Levenshtein distances can be used in a similar fashion to narrow searches; useful for pattern matching. For instance if one has a list of potentially misspelled words which must be matched with another such list, both Hamming and Levenshtein postulated the same concept for ostensibly different applications. I like what you have contributed. I will save it for a future reading.

On Oct 19, 2010, at 6:07 PM, Peter Bachman wrote:

"hamming distance" pops up this time in the context of Google medical
records and digital security. This could be due to recentness effect,
since now I am noticing it, and it's getting much closer to what I am
focused on.

http://www.cigital.com/silverbullet/shows/silverbullet-054.mp3

So is it just the Bader Meinhof phenomenon or synchronicity?

I agree we tend to think that we generally randomly grep our way through
well known patterns, (that are not always there) through bit flipping,
and therefore assign meaning frequently without any real justification.

Thus we end up with a lot of monsters coming through closet doors in
dark rooms scaring little kids at night.

But some patterns are so commonplace, (they lack unique information)
that we tend to focus on the ones which float up in novel and
interesting ways...in a Eureka moment.

Wolfgang Pauli was well known for his seeming effect on objects around
him, crossing over on multiple levels of meaning, at different places,
at Princeton, or in Germany.

He tended to break things just by being around, and that breaking often
had a deeper symbolic as well as the physical effect. The Chinese-vase
flood/Fludd synchronicity was one example of many, including the reactor
at the Princeton advanced Physics lab, etc.

This gets explored in some theories by John Wheeler ("It from Bit") and
David Deutsch regarding information as a possible basis for physical
interactions, beyond our mental focus that fixates on a random phrase or
idea. The fact that it has significance in error correction and
comparing flipped bits as well as protocol fuzzing, I like.

thanks for your replies!

-pb

On 10/1/2010 2:07 AM, Paul L. Snyder wrote:
As for the mental portion:

http://www.damninteresting.com/the-baader-meinhof-phenomenon

Paul

On September 30, 2010, "John Summers" <john@grownspace.net> wrote:

An XOR of two strings yields the number of differences between them.
Such measures
enable error checking. Hamming distances (Hamming was at Bell Labs) may
make Hamming
encoding possible. Quick and efficient error checking is offered by XORs
doing the
work.

On Sep 30, 2010, at 7:59 PM, Peter Bachman wrote:

So weirdly enough the phrase "hamming encoded" has shown up in three
different separate contexts this week, and I had never heard of it before.

-pb
-
**Majordomo list services provided by PANIX <URL:http://www.panix.com>**
**To Unsubscribe, send "unsubscribe phl" to majordomo@lists.pm.org**

-
**Majordomo list services provided by PANIX <URL:http://www.panix.com>**
**To Unsubscribe, send "unsubscribe phl" to majordomo@lists.pm.org**