The View from the Quai Voltaire

The idea of "miniaturization technology," the technology of miniaturization, has possessed my soul the last couple of days, filling me with vast, vague speculation... What is "file compression"? Esssentially, as near as I can make it out, it means: eliminating redundancies in the algorithms of encoded data. Mouthful. But when you get to thinking about it, what isn't an algorithm? Genomes are algorithms. We, perhaps, are algorithms--Turing, the inventor of the pluperfect "universal algorithm" from which the modern computer is descended, evidently quite sincerely believed that humans have souls and that these are algorithms. Why is this all so reminiscent of Leibnitz and monads and infinitesimal calculus? Stuff about which I know less than nothing, but which all sounds so strangely, anachronistically alike. May we hope any day soon for a rebirth of the Rococo? A resurgence of counterpoint? Masked balls? Round-dancing? If we are indeed, in compact essence, sets among sets, algorithms among algorithms--more or less redundant--it seems possible.