On Wed, 2 Dec 2015 10:02:01 -0600, Dana Mitchell wrote: >On Tue, 1 Dec 2015 23:03:59 +0000, J O Skip Robinson wrote: > >>(This whole season feels like Friday.) A doughnut, on the other hand, >>requires the hole for its very definition. The hole supplies no mass or >>nutritional value, but without it the thing is not a doughnut. By contrast a >>punch card requires the solid part to give the holes meaning; they would >>otherwise collapse into gibberish. > >In school we verified that if you multi-punch every possible punch out of a >card, the result is indeed very fragile. But it was fun to dupe > This could inspire a Retro engineering project: Given the constraint of required mechanical strength, devise an encoding that maximizes information density. Akin to GCR:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_code_recording (How much does the hole diminish the mechanical strength of the bagel?) -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN