Mark C. Chu-Carroll writes about data compression and shrinking gains with multiple pass encryption…. He’s a little on the technical side, but anyone with a basic understanding should be able to easily keep up…

Good Math, Bad Math : I Get Mail: Iterative Compression: “He’s invented a method where he can take a source document, and repeatedly compress it, making it smaller each time.

This is a stupid idea that I’ve seen entirely too many times. But instead of just making fun of it, I thought it would be interesting to explain in detail why it doesn’t work. It touches on a bunch of basic facts about how data compression works, and provides a nice excuse for me to write a bit about compression.”