@Keith post #1: Slogging along, two steps forward and one backward. There is so much jucy material in here I find I am discovering ideas that I find irresistible that I must follow up on. Thanks for this reference Keith. I am now working through this paper. In my earlier days I took a stab at statistical mechanics. There is an idea I have had for some time; there is a deeper way of thinking about "information" than we find from Shannon/Boltzmann.

My intuition is that what is missing is the notion of how information has a lot to do with context. So the launch codes for a nuclear missile have very little Shannon information. Analogously if you take the human genome and put it in a beaker of water what do you have? Answer: food. You need a human cell to interpret the "information" in the genome.

My intuition further tells me that databases serve to build context. Unfortunately my formal mathematical skills have proven inadequate to develop these intuitions into something more tangible.

Not sure where this is going but I am finding David's paper really intriguing, so thank you David for your insights. I am fascinated by dits. Very entertaining!