this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2024
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The Bit is a unit of information, like the Liter is a unit of volume. The Bit may also be called Shannon, though I do not know where that is commonly done.
When people talk about a liter, they are often thinking about a liter of milk, or gas. That is, they are thinking of a quantity of a certain substance rather than of a volume in the abstract. People may also say liter to mean a specific carton or bottle, even if it no longer contains a liter of whatever.
Similarly, people will say "bit" when they mean something more specific than just a unit of measurement. For example, the least significant bit, or the parity bit, and so on. It may refer to a lot of things that can contain 1 Bit of information.
The fact that the headline is talking about bits/s makes clear that this is talking about how much information goes through a human mind per time unit.