"Samuel R. Delany - High Weir" - читать интересную книгу автора (Delaney Samuel R)

Richard Nielson was staring directly at the top of her head.

"If I sit down at the table before the rest of you," Mak said, ducking under the steps
for the coffeepot, "you're only going to get half your breakfast."
Smith, Jones, and Jimmi took their chairs. Mak set the steaming enameled pot (it,
too, was from Yugoslavia, and had come with Vital Equipment) on the coffee table,
sat down, and took four pieces of toast.

"Actually, you don't." Ling passed the egg platter to Hodges. "If you think of it as a
method of information storage, you'll understand. You take the ordinary hologram
plate, cut it in half, and then shine a laser beam on it, and you get the complete,
three-dimensional image hanging there, full size. Only it's slightly out of focus, blurry,
a little less distinct." He folded a sliver of ham with blackened edges and skewered it
to some toast. "And if you cut it again, the image just goes a bit more out of focus.
Try and imagine a photograph and a hologram of the same object side by side.
Every dot of light-sensitive emulsion on each is a bit of information about the object.
But the information dots on the photographic plate only relate to one point of a
two-dimensional reduction. The information dots on the hologram plate relate to the
entire, solid, three-dimensional object. So you see, it's vastly more efficient and far
more complete. Theoretically, even a square millimeter cut from a hologram will
have something to tell you about the whole object."

"Does that 'theoretical' mean something," Mak asked between burblings of his briar,
"or is it just rhetoric?"

"Well," Ling said, "there is a point of diminishing returns. From what I've said, it
would seem that most information storage is essentially photographic: writing, tape,
punchcardsтАФ"

"But those are all linear," Dr. Jones objected.

"Photographic in that there's a one-to-one relation between each datum and each
un-integrated factтАФ"

"Think of a photograph as composed of the lines of a television picture," Jimmi said,
hastily swallowing eggs and toast. "A photograph can be reduced to linear terms,
too."

"That's right," Ling said.

"Diminishing returns тАж," Hodges prompted.

"Oh, yes. It's simply this: If you only have a relatively small number of
addressesтАФcybernetics term for the places your data are going to go"тАФhe explained
to Jimmi's puzzled lookтАФ"then you're often better off with photographic or linear
storage. That's because you need so many bits of hologramic information before
the image starts to clear enough to beтАФ"

"тАФanything but a menacing shadow, a ghost, a specter of itself, a vague outline filled
with the unknown and too insubstantial to contain it."