

An inch-long universal text encoder - marvel_boy
http://jmac.org/encoder/

======
informatimago
Good idea. However, there are problems.

Thermal vibration will make the atoms move about 10^−11 m. Therefore you won't
be able to measure the length of line with a precision better than that.
Therefore you will be able to encode without loss only 9 decimal digits, or
7.8 hexadecimal digits.

Also, you have to consider where you print this line. Paper expands depending
on ambiant humidity, with factors on the order of 0.05%, which means that you
will be able to encode without loss only 3 or 5 decimal digits.

If you print it on something like a metalic piece, then expansion will depend
on the temperature, between 4.5 for W and 61 for He, so you won't be able to
encode any digit.

Unless you calibrate and maintain a controlled environment, such for example,
the very costly and sophisticated controlled environment maintained around the
etalon meter (before the meter was redefined in function of the speed of light
and the duration of 9192631770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the
transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium
133 atom).

~~~
tjradcliffe
There's also the issue of gravity waves, and don't get me started on the
Planck Length. I believe the vendor's claims for the encoding of arbitrarily
large document collections are _considerably_ overstated!

------
theoh
It might be worth mentioning that this is quite similar to arithmetic coding,
which is a real and effective compression technique.

