Cheem: talking of mdern SF, Iain M Banks' 'Feersum Endjinn' features a method of backing up personalities to a centralised storage. One of the key motivations in many of the character's lives is to experience as many unique experiences as possible - otherwise the compression algorithms in The Vault will largely erase them upon their attempt to transfer.

OOH! I love this kind of stuff.

[At this point the old warhorse sniffs the air and tosses her head - I did a geology degree]

I seem to remember that with the Mars "stromatolites" there was a problem of scale - the structures might have been an effect of the treatment you give things before you can look at them under electron microscopes.

btw stromatolites hang on in a few places in our modern world: http://www.sharkbay.org/terrestial_enviroment/page_15.htm

And the fossil ones are a good proof that the Earth is spinning slower than it did (a sort of tree ring effect - difference between winter and summer growth).

That's more than you ever wanted to know about stromatolites I bet.

I can almost imagine compressing modern science fiction... try compressing, say, Gor or Robert Jordan and comparing it with, say, _The Left Hand of Darkness_ or something... I wonder if compressability could be used as a mark of quality...

Has anyone gone about the useless but interesting task of compressing the various classics in literature and seeing how much redundancy they contain?

I wonder how Moby Dick compresses, it seems long but I wonder if it's also mostly redundant.

What boingboing addict said.

It's been found that you can distinguish texts in different languages by the way they compress, too:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/30/science/physical/30ZIP.html

Have they tried this on pictures of other things, like world leaders?

that is sooooooo coooooooool