Computerphile

+Computerphile Thank you! I know it can be really tricky to get that stuff right so I'll be patient. I look forward to seeing the results :)

It's truly the resolution (both in size and color) that limits what information any one such image can convey.  You wouldn't be able to see a satellite view of the Earth from space with you holding up one finger, vs the same satellite view of the Earth with you holding up two fingers.  This is because such information is beneath the threshold of information in the image.  The exact pixel that you occupy (intended to be a single pixel, for the purposes of my argument anyway) is the only pixel that contains any information about you, and when you hold up two fingers instead of one, even if you're wearing bright white gloves, it wouldn't change this pixel's intensity enough to take on the next 16-bit greyscale value.   So it's not that the set of all such images contains "everything that you can describe", because we can describe details of an image that would require more resolution to display.  Another way of thinking of it is that not even a single one of those images is a picture of an entire broadsheet newspaper with readable fine print (although you could probably make out some headlines).  Because the fine print is not readable at that resolution.  It's all about how much information is contained.  So I think the notion of the "instructions to build a time dilation device" is not likely to be contained in there (as a single image) unless someone makes use of clever steganography to embed extra non-visual information to that effect.  While it's certainly true that a zoomed in view of any particular square inch of those instructions would be contained.

Bear in mind that for every plan for a time dilation device there will be lots of plans that won't quite work and a huge amount of utter nonsense. The only way you can tell them apart is if you already know what your looking for. Either way you can never get useful info out.

basically the way you would hand write a number is little endian, the way you would hand write some text is big endian. well, sort of...  I heard it's just an engineering decision when they were designing the chips...