Plus, of course, he's talking about that raindrop in isolation. To describe it in context with the real world, you also need to factor in the light refracting through it, the position of the observer, and the pace at which it moves both due to gravity and to the earth's rotation. So to describe it accurately from a single position requires knowledge of everything around that raindrop.

In fact, it's possible to say then that you could start with something as simple as, say, a piece of fairy cake, and deduce accurately the nature of everything else in the universe.

Reading this, the thing that stuck out to me was the relatively small size of text (5MB for Shakespeare versus 20GB for Beethoven). It struck me that poetry - particularly haiku, which deals with nature - is sort of a primitive way of applying lenses to the world to create a filter for viewing things by appealing to collective experiences. Just a thought.

This is John Baez. I am pretty sure he has read GEB.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Baez

Interesting that you thought of describing a raindrop... I thought of storing information in it ;)

Just imagine how much bigger our storage mechanisms will get...