Information Science
This is the introduction to the Information Science series. Content coming soon.
9 posts in this series
Why Document Everything?
Unaided memory fails in measurable ways, and saving without structure does not repair those failures. What documentation adds, and why digital is the medium for most of it.
Information Loss
Four ways information is lost, and why 'save it somewhere' protects against only one of them.
What is Information?
A working definition for the rest of the series: data with enough structure, context, and purpose that a reader can retrieve it, understand it, and act on it.
Encoding and Character Sets
ASCII, Unicode, UTF-8 — why text gets garbled and how character encoding actually works.
Entropy
Why information systems become chaotic — and a practical framework for thinking about organization vs disorder.
Space Complexity
Why the same content takes 11 bytes as .txt and 12KB as .docx — practical storage implications of format choices.
Time Complexity
Why Markdown is faster to write than Word, and why grep beats Word search — practical efficiency implications.
Metadata
Information about information — file properties, EXIF in photos, and why metadata matters for organization and privacy.
Content vs Presentation
The fundamental separation — why what you write and how it looks should be different things.