Join the club! In another thread there was some calculations related to the size of the human genome in bits. The thread referenced a news story that was ambiguous in how it was using ‘bit’. Josh knows that I’m interested in overloaded terms and brought it to my attention. I made a highly amusing (read: dubious) joke involving yet another meaning of ‘bit’ (half of a quarter, as in ‘shave and a haircut, two bits’). Then I doubled down on the (again, dubious) humor by calling back to the discussion here about adjusting the relative size of the Sun, based solely on the fact that entropy also appears in information theory and its bits.
For my sins, I then immediately fell down my own pit trap of wondering whether it would be actually possible to calculate an “actual” answer to my nonsensical question. To wit: how much bigger would the human genome have to be (in information-theory-bits) to have more entropy than the entropy arriving on Earth in one second from the Sun? I have no delusions that the answer will be meaningful in any sense other than the tomfoolery of making units match up.
Thanks!
Seeing as how I went awry previously by trying to do math late at night, I think I will put off the actual calculation for now. But I do appreciate the added info.