Recent posts Blog archive One of the signal achievements of computing is data compression1: we take in data, make it smaller while retaining all information (“lossless” compression), transmit it, and then decompress it back to the original at the other end. For many years, compression was an absolute requirement to get things done: storage devices were too small for the data we wanted to store and networks too slow to transmit what we wanted at an acceptable speed. Today compression is less ofte...