I just stumbled upon this word (whilst putting random shit into wordle)
A nepit is 1.44 bits of infomation, and apparently this is the natural unit of information. Because logarithms something something.
I means wtf? Surely bits, being indivisible, can only be counted using whole numbers. How can a nepit exist? What can it be used for?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nat_(unit)
I feel like this might be an academic hoax.
Is it perhaps useful for calculating Donald Trump’s lies divided by Boris Johnson’s bullshit?
Also applicable for measuring Liz Truss's IQ, or how may tanks Putin sill has.
I hope this doesn't mean that amongst all the brilliant, expert people on JTT with knowledge as wide and deep as the ocean, not one of you can offer a layman's summary as to what a nepit is
This more fundamental concept of bits is the quantification of information, and is sometimes referred to as Shannon’s Bits.
Fnarr!
A nepit sounds as if it should be a subdivision of an oblast.
How many to a voivodship?
The best I can make of it is that any given bit is indivisible, but that doesn't mean that fractions of a bit are meaningless in general. For example, it might be useful in some circumstances to say that a collection of separate pieces of information each contain an average of 4.5 bits, or similar.
A bit here is a unit of information theory where 1 bit of information is the amount of information required to reduce a problem space by half. Expressing this logarithmically just makes this more grokkable.
Good explanation in this video about using information theory to think about solving Wordle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v68zYyaEmEA
That's very interesting slicey, and gives me a slightly better understanding of the distinction between a bit in computer science and a bit in information theory. Still not sure what is the use of a nepit though
Because it's natural numbers. A bit is based on powers of 2 and is great for computer things (i.e. binary), but you need nits based on powers of e if you want to deal with many real world systems. It's like the difference between natural (base e) and standard (base 10) logarithms.
So if you wanted to work out how much information you could send down a copper wire (i.e. analog) you need to do the maths using nepits or you are going to be very disappointed with your modem speeds c. 1986 :-)
Baud with this