Umberto Eco on Paper vs. Electronic Memory

joabj writes "Paper was itself a technology at one point, this essay from Umberto Eco, author of "In The Name of the Rose," reminds us. Eco holds forth on the differences between paper and electronic memory. He doesn't come out in favor of either, rather he talks about the advantages each has, in technical terms. Some fascinating ideas here...."

Comments

Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[grub]

Paper is better than electronic for long term storage. There are already concerns for data being lost forever because of incompatible older formats and hardware. Paper was good enough for da Vinci.

Yeah.

[DrEldarion]

It's a sad day when we need a huge article to explain to us the differences between paper and a hard drive.

Re:Yeah.

[Threni]

Hey, it's Eco you're talking about! He writes big, deliberately confusing books to disguise the fact that he always wanted to write childrens books.

Re:Yeah.

[slart42]

>It's a sad day when we need a huge article to explain to us the differences between paper and a hard drive.

What is this "paper" you're talking about? I haven't used 5 1/4 inch floppys in ages..

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[Anonymous Coward]

But how many priceless documents have been lost over the millenia? Some of da Vinci's works may be lost to time.

Strange

[Pingular]

how paper for years has been used to record things by writing them down, now this...

advanttages and disadvantages

[mrsev]

Paper can be stored for ages and is so redundant in its information carrying capacity that even with degradation and damage is still HUMAN readable.

Try the same with a HD and see how much damage it can take. On the other hand electronic data can be copied ad infinitum. ..

Re:advanttages and disadvantages

[MrMickS]

On the other hand electronic data can be copied ad infinitum

With Xerox so can paper :)

Re:advanttages and disadvantages

[Anonymous Coward]

and you don't need electricity to read paper, try that with a harddrive

Re:advanttages and disadvantages

[isorox]

And butts, at least arround Xmas

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[in7ane]

To play devil's advocate - what about all the data that is lost forever because there is simply not enough paper to record it on (electronic storage has a much higher content/size ratio)?

As for incompatible older formats - is that like old languages which are hard to decipher? As mankind progresses extracting data from old electronic formats will be similar to extracting it from squiggles on stone pillars.

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[grub]

Countless priceless documents may have been lost however a lot of it is due to religious zealotry and war. I'd wager the bulk of the lost books/scrolls didn't just rot on a shelf, they were torched.

And don't forget the alphabet

[heironymouscoward]

John Gray, author of Straw Dogs, one of the best books you could read this year, suggests that the Latin alphabet, with its complete abstraction from physical objects, has been the basis of western philosophical models, mainly to the detriment of our view of the world. He suggests that Chinese iconography, in contrast, helped the establishment of a worldview in which humans played less of a central role.

Paper, the way we describe our world, the way we describe ourselves... the impact on the way we think can be enormous.

As for "technology", everything we make has been radical new technology at some point. People are so impressed that chip prices fall every 18 months. But this applies to all technological products when you're climbing the S curve.

Re:And don't forget the alphabet

[Anonymous Coward]

His ideas aren't very new. Check out anything by Marshal McLuhan and you'll find a lot of the same stuff.

Re:And don't forget the alphabet

[mechaZardoz]

This article might have been informative...10 years ago; Umberto's a bit behind the times.

Re:And don't forget the alphabet

[Anonymous Coward]

>He suggests that Chinese iconography, in contrast, helped the establishment of a
>worldview in which humans played less of a central role.

Yeah, the sooner we end up with a quality of life/human rights etc similar to those enjoyed in China, the better, as far as I'm concerned.

(If you're reading this in the States, you won't have to wait too long for those human rights. Noticed how all the attention is now on inspecting Irans nuclear power plants? Don't you think we need a lesson on what happens if the wrong people get hold of material from such plants? I predict a "terrorist" (yeah, right) nuclear attack on an ally of the US. Not the US itself - it'd cost too much - and not a good friend like the UK. Perhaps not even France or Germany. But maybe Italy, Greece or Turkey.)

Re:And don't forget the alphabet

[Anonymous Coward]

John Gray is a FAGGOT, and so are you.

Re:And don't forget the alphabet

[RayBender]

John Gray, author of Straw Dogs, one of the best books you could read this year, suggests that the Latin alphabet, with its complete abstraction from physical objects, has been the basis of western philosophical models, mainly to the detriment of our view of the world. He suggests that Chinese iconography, in contrast, helped the establishment of a worldview in which humans played less of a central role.

Why is that to the detriment of our worldview? Abstraction from physical objects has allowed us to develop things like abstract mathematics and music. Beside, the much-maligned western worldview has led to the most stunningly successful civilization anywhere, anywhen. Sure there are problems (environmental, societal, economic, political, spiritual) and things we could improve; but now we have the material security and scientific knowledge to begin dealing with those issues, and what is to say that any other civilization would be any better at dealing with these issues, anyway?. The adored Chinese worldview appears to have produced a stagnant behemoth unable to compete with modernity, nor provide the standard of living to the masses that we all take for granted. In addition, ancient China referred to itself as the 'middle kingdom', i.e. the center of the world (which is partly why it failed to keep up). That's pretty self-centered in my book.

Finally, it is the development of modern science (in partciular astronomy) that has fundamentially changed our view of the Universe; we now know that we are but a small planet orbiting an average star in an average Galaxy etc etc. That's pretty humbling, and entirely the fruit of western thought.

People who confuse current problems with fundamental limitations, and who over-romanticise primitive cultures (while enjoying all the fruits of modern life) really, really irritate me.

Re:And don't forget the alphabet

[Ozymandias1350]

Dude, does your comma key look worn and about half the size of the rest of the keyboard?

Re:And don't forget the alphabet

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you, it's good to see non-stupid people on this site once in a while

Re:And don't forget the alphabet

[heironymouscoward]

Why is that to the detriment of our worldview?

No-one is romanticising a particular culture. John Gray's argument (which I quite like, even if it's not 100% my own opinion) is this: western thought has been driven by a human-centered world view since the time of Plato. This world view has, indeed, been the basis for modern western life, but also the basis for seriously aggressive religions and many social problems.

The argument continues: the idea that humans are "special" leads to the myth of human perfectability, which flies in the face of scientific knowledge (all life is equal), and has been the cause of many of the disasters of the 20th century, including the "-isms". The Nazi ideas of perfectability, he argues, could only have arisen from a world view in which ideas could be disconnected from the natural world, and this requires a totally abstract alphabet.

Of course it's a more elegant explanation than I can give here, and one that is anything but romantic. Find the book, read it, you will not regret it.

Re:And don't forget the alphabet

[Anonymous Coward]

feeling a little insecure, are we?

Re:And don't forget the alphabet

[Anonymous Coward]

And you're saying the Chinese were never aggressive? My friend, you've got darker glasses than Ray Charles. Just look up some of the tong wars, the Boxer Rebellion, the systematic slaughter and persecution of various ethnic groups. Hell, for a long time, it was considered legal under Chinese law to kill Ouighers if they traveled in groups of three or more.

And for the record, what about the Japanese who use a similarly ideographic language and commited some of the NASTIEST wartime attrocities ever. You think the Rape of Nanking, the abduction of Korean women to serve as prostitutes, and the introduction of plague into China during WWII were all accidents?

Give me a fucking break.

Re:And don't forget the alphabet

[heironymouscoward]

And you're saying the Chinese were never aggressive?

Of course violence is a human universal. That's not news, and I did not argue the opposite. What I said was this: there is a theory that the latin alphabet has been the cause of a particularly human-centric school of thought that appears obvious to us but is not universal.

Re:And don't forget the alphabet

[heironymouscoward]

Dude, it's fucking HUGE, and says, in bitchy, black, bold letters, PRESS ME!!

Oh, yeah, I love my commas.

Re:And don't forget the alphabet

[Anonymous Coward]

Who, you and John Gray? Probably.

Re:And don't forget the alphabet

[Anonymous Coward]

This guy is obviously just a hack ripping off McLuhan's ideas and making them more digestible for the masses. McLuhan took it to much more interesting places.

Re:And don't forget the alphabet

[The Cydonian]

You know, I find it really irritating to defend Eastern cultures every second day here on /. especially when people miss the point by miles, but really:-

Abstraction from physical objects has allowed us to develop things like abstract mathematics and music.

And the Chinese don't have abstract mathematics or music? As in, what's the relevance to the abstraction you're talking about?

Sure there are problems (environmental, societal, economic, political, spiritual) and things we could improve;

Potentially by integrating our worldview with theirs, perhaps?

but now we have the material security and scientific knowledge to begin dealing with those issues, and what is to say that any other civilization would be any better at dealing with these issues, anyway?

See, exactly what I was talking about. You have a clear-cut linear view, you go from X to Y and then to Z. Nothing wrong with that, mind you, but that's not how a few other civilisations look at things. They see things in a unified spectrum; they don't, for instance, cut down the trees in their sacred land not for the trees themselves, but because cutting them down would cause their ancient spirits to become angry, who, in turn, will influence the Cloud Gods, who, again, with the Wind God and the Rain God, will cause havoc to their settlement. A worldview that's, at once, more complex than the usual mode of thought.

I don't know if it's more responsible or not, but all the same, it's an intriguing point to ask what do they see that we don't.

The adored Chinese worldview appears to have produced a stagnant behemoth unable to compete with modernity, nor provide the standard of living to the masses that we all take for granted.

You could say the same thing about the ancient Roman Empire as well. Nothing uniquely Chinese about stagnation.

In addition, ancient China referred to itself as the 'middle kingdom', i.e. the center of the world (which is partly why it failed to keep up). That's pretty self-centered in my book.

I was going to post on how stupid that comment is, considering how closed-minded some of the Americans I meet are, but I'll pass. Here's a more positive argument:- heard of Zheng He? At his time, his ships were the largest in the world, at least five times bigger than the equivalent Portuguese ships.

Which brings us to the real point here:- the Chinese, as with the Indians, didn't need to explore the world as much as the then Europeans did. Renaissance-time exploration was actually an effort by the Europeans to take over the trade routes for spices; back then, they didn't have refrigeration, so they had to depend on spices to preserve their meat. Unfortunately for the Europeans, the Arab (this includes Muslim, Jewish AND Christian) middle-men had complete control over this trade, so they set out to find a sea route to the East to capture control over this trade (which they did very easily, mostly because the native rulers in Arabia, India and elsewhere were more experienced in trade negotiations than in political, that is, military, negotiations.)

In short, NOTHING to do with linguistics and everything to do with basic economics.

Finally, it is the development of modern science (in partciular astronomy) that has fundamentially changed our view of the Universe; we now know that we are but a small planet orbiting an average star in an average Galaxy etc etc. That's pretty humbling, and entirely the fruit of western thought.

Two words:- Chamyogya Upanishad. Verse 211 or something.

Unfortunately, this one of those cultural artifacts that are beyond the reach of Google, so you probably won't know what I'm talking about, but let's put it this way:- it's one of the first references in world literature to the fact that the Earth is, as a matter of fact, revolving around the Sun, and not vice versa. This some 3000 years before Copernicus.

Re:And don't forget the alphabet

[dvdeug]

<i>John Gray, author of Straw Dogs, one of the best books you could read this year, suggests that the Latin alphabet, with its complete abstraction from physical objects, has been the basis of western philosophical models, mainly to the detriment of our view of the world. He suggests that Chinese iconography, in contrast, helped the establishment of a worldview in which humans played less of a central role.</i>

How is "book" less icongraphic than U+4E66 (ASCII art below)? Chinese is in no real sense icongraphic; at best, there's a few characters where you can imagine how they might have originally been drawings. Furthermore, the worldview which is less centered around humans, is largely a result of the reincarnation beliefs of the Buddhists, based of the similar beliefs of the Hindus, both of which originated in India; and India invariably uses alphabetic writing systems, just like the west.

It's easy to take the differences between China and Europe and blame any random difference. But this random difference from the Chinese is also shared by the Indians, the Thai and Koreans.

I \
--I-I
I I
--I---I
I I
I

Re:And don't forget the alphabet

[solferino]

John Gray, author of Straw Dogs, one of the best books you could read this year, suggests that the Latin alphabet, with its complete abstraction from physical objects, has been the basis of western philosophical models, mainly to the detriment of our view of the world. He suggests that Chinese iconography, in contrast, helped the establishment of a worldview in which humans played less of a central role.

Firstly, spare us the gratuitous superlatives, such as 'one of the best books...'.

Secondly, this John Gray appears to be spouting off about Chinese orthography with out any real knowledge of it, and is thus exposed as a fool. Chinese orthography is simply not 'iconographic' and thus the whole basis of his argument is erroneous.

dvdeug has already posted a good rebuttal to your posting. For some more complete rebuttals of this chinese 'iconographic' myth that you are helping to perpetuate see : Ideographic Myth and Difficult Characters

Re:And don't forget the alphabet

[RayBender]

they don't, for instance, cut down the trees in their sacred land not for the trees themselves, but because cutting them down would cause their ancient spirits to become angry, who, in turn, will influence the Cloud Gods, who, again, with the Wind God and the Rain God, will cause havoc to their settlement

Bullshit. Maybe the Fire God likes that you cut down the trees and burn them in sacrifice so he influences the Earth Maiden to bring a fruitful harvest? How do you tell the difference? Observation, hypothesis testing. The scientific method in short. Earlier cultures may use different language, but that's the basis for successfully dealing with your environment. That being said, other people may have made valuable observations that you should pay attention to, even if they are couched in unfamiliar language.

"Linear thinking" is a meaningless catchphrase that people like to throw around as a criticism of modern thought, but it doesn't really mean anything. Modern thought is perfectly able to deal with feedback mechanisms.

heard of Zheng He? At his time, his ships were the largest in the world, at least five times bigger than the equivalent Portuguese ships.

Great example. His voyages were pretty impressive. But then the Chinese abandoned their fleets, and fifty years later were unable to build anything larger than a single-masted dhow. Which meant that when the Europeans showed up they were at a serious disadvantage, subject to economic exploitation and gunboat diplomacy. Abandoning the ir exploration was terribly shortsighted and frankly, a disastrous decision for the Chinese. The lesson is not that the Chinese way of thinking is superior, it's that cultural arrogance can be disastrous. Yes, I understand that applies to us, too.

Which brings us to the real point here:- the Chinese, as with the Indians, didn't need to explore the world as much as the then Europeans did.

Whatever. They didn't, so they played second fiddle to the Europeans for a long, long time.

Two words:- Chamyogya Upanishad. Verse 211 or something. Unfortunately, this one of those cultural artifacts that are beyond the reach of Google, so you probably won't know what I'm talking about, but let's put it this way:- it's one of the first references in world literature to the fact that the Earth is, as a matter of fact, revolving around the Sun, and not vice versa.

No, big difference. Some ancient verse claims the Earth revolves around the Sun. Another says the Earth is on the back of a turtle, standing on an Elephant etc. etc. Which is right? How do you tell the difference? With observation and the scientific method. If you had told me about an ancient Chinese text that discussed hypothesis testing I'd be impressed. But you haven't, so I'm not.

please correct title of Umberto Eco's book

[postworek]

Real title is "Name of the rose" not "In the name of the rose".

Re:please correct title of Umberto Eco's book

[glwtta]

Real title is "Name of the rose" not "In the name of the rose".

We are almost there - the title is "The Name of the Rose" :) Fun book, too.

Re:please correct title of Umberto Eco's book

[RestiffBard]

Heh, I was just checking to see if anyone had made that correction yet. Am I the only one that notices that when ever Eco's first novel is mentioned they add the "in the name of" part.

Re:please correct title of Umberto Eco's book

[KDan]

Yes, if you're gonna quote the title (in the story or the comments) do it the basic honour of remembering it!!! Those extra two letters make a lot of difference

The name of the rose of past times is just a name, but only names remain amongst us.

Daniel

Re:please correct title of Umberto Eco's book

[zebul0n]

Exactly, the original name in italian is "Il nome della rosa" and the english translation of the book was "The Name of the Rose". (see http://www.dsc.unibo.it/dipartimento/people/eco/cu rriculum.html for Eco's resume). 1980 Il nome della rosa. Milano: Bompiani (Commented edition, ed. by Costantino Marmo. Milano: Edizioni Scolastiche Fabbri, 1990). Translations: Le nom de la rose. Paris: Grasset, 1982. Der Name der Rose. Munchen: Hanser, 1982. El nombre de la rosa. Barcelona: Lumen, 1982. The Name of the Rose. New York: Harcourt, 1983, London: Secker & Warburg, 1983. Rosens Namn. Stockholm: Brombergs, 1983. Ruusun Nimi.Helsinki: Soderstrom, 1983. De Naam van de Roos. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1983.

Re:please correct title of Umberto Eco's book

[nfk]

A funny thing about that name, according to a text I read by Umberto Eco, is that it is based on a verse from an Italian poem, which was originally "The name of Rome". The error may have cropped up somehow, and the author used the wrong version for the book title.

Re:please correct title of Umberto Eco's book

[Anonymous Coward]

>> A funny thing about that name, according to a text I read by Umberto Eco, is that it is based on a verse from an Italian poem, which was originally "The name of Rome".

Really?

I have always thought it had to do with that Shakespeare's poem...

Re:please correct title of Umberto Eco's book

[nfk]

I had read this a long time ago, and my memory failed me... From Eco (original here):

"Moreover someone has discovered that some early manuscripts of De Contemptu Mundi of Bernard de Morlay, from which I borrowed the exameter "stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus", read "stat Roma pristina nomine" - which after all is more coherent with the rest of the poem, which speaks of the lost Babylon."

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[grub]

I'm not suggesting printing out huge data sets (ie: the human genome) but keeping hard copies of interesting email, writings, etc should be a must. Most people don't keep backups very well and one dead hard drive means gigs of data lost forever.

That's a damn shame.

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[in7ane]

Wouldn't electronic storage have an advantage in this sense? Well, short of DRM, the ability to make exact copies and easily distribute them makes archiving a lot easier, and destroying something for religios/political reasons a lot harder.

Electronic ink related posts go here

[FrankoBoy]

Thank you very much.

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[tomknight]

Yeah, right.

I don't want to think about how you propose cataloging all the paper data you want kept.
Or about the way you'd ensure the data's backed up.
Or about how you would propagate a change through your enormous cross-indexed mirrored filing cabinets.

Yes, long term storage of electronic data could be a problem, but this is why you review your data storage methods periodically, and ensure you aren't using hard/software that won't be readable in five/ten/fifty years time.

I know that paper certainly was good enough for da Vinci, but also the library at Alexandria - and how did that fare?

Tom.

Domesday

[Space cowboy]

I think the best example is probably the domesday book and the domesday project.

A thousand years ago (more or less) the Domesday book recorded a snapshot of life in England (and Wales I think ,but I think the scots gave'em the finger :-), it's still available today.

20 (or so) years ago, the domesday project did the same thing - recorded to a laserdisk, and intended to be a resource of all things at that time. For the time, it was pretty fantastic - schools up and down the country took part, videos were made, maps, testaments from people of all walks of life.

There is now a project to try and resurrect the domesday project, because no technology available can read it. The book (though written in latin) is still perfectly legible. Which is the better technology ?

Paper every time, apart from when you're searching :-)

Simon.

Re:Domesday

[Monk[Deviant Form]]

the key to being able to read old books has been down to them being copied over time (we hope faithfully) and being able to translate them (we hope correctly).that is the same challenge for the electronic route,making good and consistant backups of old data and "translating" old formats before they are completely obselete.

Re:Domesday

[Space cowboy]

The original, uncopied version of the domesday book is in fine fettle in the public record office, in Kew, London.

I stand by the claim that 1000 years (and counting) is better than 20 (and out).

Simon.

Re:Domesday

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, but the domesday project was just for kids TV and some primary schools. if there was any point in actually storing what they had, then they would have done.

the reason it's unreadable now is that it was junk to start with, so noone bothered.

Re:Domesday

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but the fact is there were dozens of technologies in use at the time that the project could have been based on, and it might have survived today. However it was built on British computer technology, which went absolutely nowhere. Don't confuse a very poorly executed project with technology failure".

"The BBC Domesday multimedia application was written in a language called BCPL. This was chosen in an attempt to give Domesday some cross platform compatibility. Unfortunately a number of patches were required to run the application on a RM Nimbus as a significant number of BBC calls were present in the original code."

So they wrote it to be cross-platform, and managed to get it to run on 2 shit British computers nobodies heard of; not IBM PCs, not Amigas, not Apples, not Macintoshes.

Re:Domesday

[Space cowboy]

The RM nimbus was the most popular computer in education at the time in the UK.

The IBM PC was nowhere to be seen, the Amiga was a dream in some designers head, the Mac hadn't been released over here. It's not the disk-designers fault that the best solutions at the time later failed to make a mark... As for BCPL, it was the precursor to 'C' (you've heard of 'C', I take it?)

So, basically, learn some history before you post complete crap.

Simon.

Re:Domesday

[STrinity]

20 (or so) years ago, the domesday project did the same thing - recorded to a laserdisk, and intended to be a resource of all things at that time. For the time, it was pretty fantastic - schools up and down the country took part, videos were made, maps, testaments from people of all walks of life.

There is now a project to try and resurrect the domesday project, because no technology available can read it.

The problem is, it wasn't a videogame. If they'd included a few side-scrolling shooters, there'd be a dozen emulators available for it.

Re:Domesday

[freeweed]

Until it burns.

Imagine if the library of Alexandria had been "backed up" to another site somewhere else in the world.

Or to bring it closer to home, a friend of mine recently had a house fire. He now only has photographs of his life dating from about 1999 onwards, when he first bought a digital camera.

I suspect the Domesday book either isn't quite as important to people as Slashdotters try to make it out to be, or they chose a really stupid format to put it in. What, did the reading equipment suddenly just break one day? Or did the thing sit and languish for a decade until someone realized "hey, we can't read this thing anymore?"

Properly stored, it's trivial to avoid the issue that's happened with the Domesday. When you realize your equipment is no longer current, copy it onto something more modern. Hell, I can still pull files off my 20 year old Commodore 64 with a little work.

Re:Domesday

[Space cowboy]

You're confusing two things, one is longevity, the other is redundancy.

The library at Alexandria was unique throughout the world; no matter what medium was used to store the data, if the container is destroyed (with significant prejudice, in this instance), the data will be lost.

The issue here was that the hardware was specific, expensive, and tied to a platform that died. Suddenly people realised they couldn't get to the data any more.

Sure, the project has little bearing on your life or mine, but it's still indicative of the difference between the storage mechanisms. Most history is considered pretty useless when it's recent (unless there's something dramatic happening: war, new peace, etc.). Only when it's old do we value it.

Simon.

Re:Domesday

[NickFitz]

There is now a project to try and resurrect the domesday project...

... and it has succeeded. Visitors to the National Archives at Kew can use a new PC-based interface to browse the original data from 1986.

Adrian's first goal was to get the BBC Master computer working reliably again.

Hmm... I'll have to dig out my BBC Model B and see if it still works reliably. Could have saved them a bit of trouble ;-)

(FWIW, it was covered here about a year ago.)

Re:Domesday

[jafac]

Better="meets requirements"

Everybody may have different requirements in mind when working on a project such as the modern domesday.

If the requirements were "get me lots of temporary fame and grant money for this fancy high-tech project" - I'd say laserdisk was the "better" technology.
If the requirement was "to produce something that would be more likely to be read by our progeny 1000 years hence", of course, it didn't work out.

Always think of the requirements. "Better" is a pretty vague description.

Re:Domesday

[Niten]

I don't see the failure of the modern-day domesday project so much as a result of some fundamental flaw in every storage medium other than paper, but merely the consequence of a flawed approach to electronic storage.

That the modern domesday records are useless to anybody without access to a laserdisc reader is analogous to the fact that the original Domesday book is useless to anybody who cannot read Latin. We can read the original Domesday book because Latin is a standardized and widely-understood language that has been in use for ages. Similarly, if it were immediately apparent how to read a laser disc (in the same way that how to read the Domesday book is immediately apparent to Latin scholars, and likely will be for some time to come) it would be a perfectly valid long term approach to information storage.

Many people consider paper a bad long-term storage medium because it does rot, given enough time, and because it takes a lot of paper to hold a little information. One solution to the storage problem that I heard somewhere else (though I can't remember where this idea originally came from) is to etch text into a spiral form on a disc of some material known to suffer very little long-term decay. The text would begin at the outer ring of the spiral, large enough to be read with the naked eye, then would quickly become smaller as it approaches the center of the disc. The bulk of the information on the disc would be recorded at as small a size as possible, allowing a large amount of information to be stored on each disc. At the same time, the storage method would be immediately apparent to any half-brained member of a future society, and thus could be easily read by anybody with the technology to build a sufficiently powerful microscope.

Of course, I am not suggesting that anybody would want to use such a disc on a day-to-day basis; this design is completely impractical for that kind of use. This kind of storage medium would, however, be appropriate for the creation of historical archives. If anybody ever desired to recall some information stored on such a disc that had otherwise been lost in the sands of time, then at that point the disc's contents could be copied to the popular storage media of the day, for more convenient access.

Re:Domesday

[MsGeek]

The original, uncopied version of the domesday book is in fine fettle in the public record office, in Kew, London.

Where also sits an x86 computer running Windows that has a fully operational version of the BBC Digital Domesday Book since June 2003. It took about 3 years to retrieve the data and write an emulator that could run the software, which originally ran on the BBC Micro computer, but they did it.

Re:Domesday

[Anonymous Coward]

It was 1986. The IBM PC, Amiga, and Macintosh all were around, having all been released somewhere between 1983 and 1985. And you must be some fucking idiot to think that Macintoshes were not in Great Britain in 1986, as they were being manufactured in Cork, Ireland in 1984. So take your own advice vis a vis history, Simon, you stupid sack of shit.

My point was that this was a human failure in executing the project, not evidence that digital archival is doomed to failure because of changing standards, as so many are wont to point out. The designers seem to have had some form of tunnel vision that caused them only to consider two platforms in their "cross-platform" vision. Moreover, their concept of cross-platform was writing a number of hardware specific code hooks, making it incredibly difficult to port even to 2 platforms. It was a shit managed project that painted itself into a corner, not a noble enterprise doomed to failure because of some sort of philosophical curse of digital media. You fucking nigger.

Re:Domesday

[ihummel]

And many people still read Latin. Just go to alt.language.latin and you will find many people who can even converse in that language.

Re:Domesday

[Space cowboy]

Dear dear, I did touch a nerve, didn't I.

It was 1984, not 1986. Read the history .... It wasn't digital, it was analogue (laserdisk is an analogue medium). The designers wrote it in a cross-platform way, that's all a designer can do - if it doesn't end up being ported to all and sundry, well, shucks. Maybe next time.

Oh yeah - I feel no particular need to abuse you just because you're wrong. Manners maketh man. I'm neither stupid nor of african descent, the 'sack of shit' is biologically pretty accurate, but then it is for all the human race...

And I never resort to being an 'Anonymous coward'. I have the good grace and moral fibre to stand by my opinions.

Simon.

Re:Domesday

[ihummel]

It is a matter of opened standards (Latin, English, or any language) versus closed (many data formats (think M$) and simplicity vs. complexity (legible marks on vegetable matter versus pits in an optical digital data storage medium). It also helps enormously that the instrument we use to read marks on paper is built-in to the vast majority of us in a functional manner, whereas laserdisk/cd/dvd/floppy readers are most certainly not, and are therefore subject to quick obsolescense.

Another part of the equation is that while computer equipment is evolving at a break-neck pace (at least for the time being), language evolves much slower and marks-on-surface technology evolves in such a way that it can still be used from era to era without learning very many new tricks (once you get past the language thing).

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[grub]

I did, I'm a subscriber but choose to usually check the "No Subscriber Bonus" box (unlike this post to prove my case).

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[Anonymous Coward]

Certainly, for distribution you can't beat electronics but it would be wise to have had hard copies around the world too.

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[tomknight]

Are you telling me you print out your emails?

Eugh.

Tom.

paper CD

[penguinoid]

What if we print to a paper like me write to a CD, and read it with a scanner? Or would that be worthwhile?

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[gl4ss]

well.. but paper has so much less space per volume, if you just keep on moving to bigger and bigger data storages(the earlier storage just being always a fraction of the new), wouldn't you able to keep much much much much larger sets of data stored? most of the important things get stored on paper(on publications & etc) nowadays as well.

though, when you archive for paper you should keep in mind to archive it in a way that doesn't self destruct.

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[Artifakt]

Between loss of electronic data from format problems, and loss of celluloid data from mouldy vaults, and loss of paper data from legal ambiguity about ownership, a surprisingly high amount of culture is going to vanish before it enters the public domain. Look around you. This just may be what a dark age looks like from the inside.

Umberto Eco

[Soulfader]

What a load of wind..tried reading from the top, tried browsing for interesting tidbits...I REALLY doubt anyone around here will be interested enough in this topic to read the article as presented.

Interestingly enough, that's how I felt about some of his books. =) It may have just been that I was too young to fully understand/appreciate what I was reading.

Name of the Rose, when I did read it later, was quite good--see the movie with Sean Connery!--but I never managed to wrap my brain around Foucault's Pendulum.

Re:Umberto Eco

[Garabito]

The name of the Rose is really good. I never thought sombebody could make a good book about some people disscusing if Jesus had ever laugh.

Re:Umberto Eco

[ishmaelflood]

Agree 100%

Rose is the only fully readable and interesting thing of his I've read. That article was a few banal ideas dressed up in polysyllabic jargon, with a bit of culture thrown in.

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[Anonymous Coward]

Redundancy is obviously always a good idea, with paper backups as a last resort - it's hardly feasible to re-digitize the data from paper (if it is just for reference, and it not being electronic doesn't matter it's a different case obviously)

Re:RTFA?

[tiled_rainbows]

That is because Umberto Eco is longwinded onld fart who is no more clever than he thinks he is. Anyone who disagrees with me should try to read "Foucault's Pendulum". Boring boring boring yadda yadda yadda.

The name of the rose is good, though. But the film is better.

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[grub]

Certain ones, of course. I printed out all email between my ex and myself regarding divorce settlements, for example. :) I wouldn't entrust that to electronic media alone if it could cost me thousands of dollars.

Required reading

[scrotch]

This article should be considered a prerequisite for any slashdotters that want to spout off (from any perspective) about copyright, intellectual property, the future of storage and/or digital rights management.

If you can't get through this article and get something from it, you shouldn't be in the debate.

Re:Required reading

[MilesBehind]

I think that when people accuse academics of using confusing terms and concepts, the issue is actually more with the listener than the lecturer.

Much like when a speaker is giving a lecture on Comdex you wouldn't expect him to explain email, internet, or describe what exactly java, .net and terms like that mean, you can't expect Umberto Ecco when talking at an event geared mostly towards literature historians to cross the interdisciplinary divide and clean up his speech for the techies.

Think of this "The more clearly you can state a complex idea, the better the author." next time you are trying to explain issues in mozilla cross-platform development to a person with little or no training in that field. Sometimes it's just not possible, most often it's not really worth the effort. In order to get something out of some academic discussions, one needs a foundation to participate.

Re:Required reading

[nuggz]

one needs a foundation to participate.

Then for a slashdot discussion it is inappropriate to suggest this as required reading.

Re:Required reading

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing is, for any meaningful bit of text there needs to be some common prerequisite knowledge.

Sometimes it's cultural, sometimes it's educational. Usually it's both, to some degree. The thing is, you never notice this until it goes beyond what you know.

While being able to communicate things to a wide audience is an important skill, it simply isn't the only skill, above all others. No significant area of science would be able to progress if communicating to the masses were critical.

BTW: What did you make of the recent Robin Milner interview? It was an excellent example of where both the interviewer and interviewee had a lot of common background knowledge that readers may or may not have (e.g. what is the frequently referenced CSP? That would be Communicating Sequential Processes - a well-known work on concurrency by Tony Hoare...but who is Tony Hoare? Charles Anthony Richard Hoare is perhaps most often introduced in compsci courses as the inventor of the quicksort algorithm, but he is also responsible for a lot more...I could go on and on). Had it been expanded to include all of the prerequisite background knowledge, it probably would've ended up being unreadable.

Re:Required reading

[guet]

Of course the fact that it is a rambled spew of ideas, it definately has something smart to say!

Maybe you should raise your expectations of yourself and others a little. If you don't feel you have the background to understand his article, show a little humility and accept it, or do something about it. Alternatively you could continue to insult his writing (have you read any of his books?), safe in the knowledge that you'll never be challenged by something you can't be bothered to understand.

Rambled is an interesting adjective, and definite has two 'i's (like finite). I'm still not sure what your first sentence means, but it was an interesting way to criticise something for being obtuse.

Re:Required reading

[ishmaelflood]

I half agree. However, Eco's fundamental ideas are not all that complex, he just dresses them up with literate references and examples, and then throws in a wodge of jargon, to make them sound more profound than they are.

Re:Required reading

[Anonymous Coward]

>> Some people have this idea that to be smart profound or insightful you need to obscure what you are saying.

Can you please elaborate on that? Perhaps in easier words? See, I'm not a native-English speaker, and you keep using uncommon words like spew, rambled, rambling, rant...

Can you use a more basic Englsih?

Thanks.

Re:Required reading

[Anonymous Coward]

YANAL

Re:Required reading

[maomoondog]

Umberto Eco might have different goals in his communication. He's not just making an argument or disseminating information. He's layering ideas about history, society, and information. He's trying to make a piece of text with a certain aesthetic, and something that can lead to further thought when contemplated on.

Your guidelines are good for practical communication like business or debate. But sometimes it's ok to ask the reader to think between words.

Re:Real money

[Anonymous Coward]

What's so "real" about the monetary value of a metal?

long-winded, but some interesting points...

[X_Caffeine]

condensed version:

"People ask me all the time if digital technology means the end of books."

"It doesn't mean the end of physical books, because the computer I just spent 12 hours reading hurts my eyes, and eBooks haven't been a success in the marketplace; never mind that it took 20 years for the engineers of cellular phones to come up with the technology and design necessary to put one in every pocket -- digital readers will never be any good because today's suck."

"It doesn't mean the end of the book as a narrative or storytelling device either, because the nature of hypertext is wholly different from linear writing. Hypertext will supplement books and fiction as another form of expression, not replace it."

I hate it when academics write about engineering problems. His points about hypertext (mostly in the last third of the essay) make RTFA worthwhile, though.

Re:long-winded, but some interesting points...

[Artifakt]

Some of those "engineering" problems are really in another domain. Even his point about hypertext making it easy to find links between things that we would normally class as not closely related, and how that may make us think there is no distinction between close and distant, sounds like an engineering problem in some ways (It's tempting to think you could solve it by counting the relative numbers of hits for a search engine, or by a catagorization scheme). Eco seems to be thinking outside of both the academic box and the engineering one by suggesting that even if we implement such an engineering solution, we won't be able to trust it without some historical perspective to tell us towards what long term goals the engineering solution should aim.

Re:long-winded, but some interesting points...

[shura57]

His points about hypertext (mostly in the last third of the essay) make RTFA worthwhile, though.

Actually, I disliked this part the most, for the following reason: saying that every word in hypertext is linked to every other word and therefore looses its unique value is the same as to say that every neuron in the brain is connected to every other neuron and then the brain is meaningless.

It could, in principle, be linked to anything, but this does not mean it is linked. The sad thing is, you can't talk about these issues and neglect the details, because all the devil is in details.

Alex

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[the eric conspiracy]

I don't want to think about how you propose cataloging all the paper data you want kept.

Librarians solved that problem hundreds of years ago.

Or about the way you'd ensure the data's backed up.

Just like anything else, another copy.

Or about how you would propagate a change through your enormous cross-indexed mirrored filing cabinets.

I am sure that removing an index card isn't that hard.

Yes, long term storage of electronic data could be a problem

Not "could be". It is a problem. It's a problem because the technology is so new people don't know what works, and what doesn't.

Archives and Comtemplation

[yintercept]

I really don't fall for the lost data due to file incompatibility issue. The last 50 years has recorded more information than any other corresponding period. Our biggest problem right now is information overload. We are recording more information than future generations can or will ever want to process. In this regards the electronic archives might prove more valuable as they can be processed by historians in a faster manner than paper.

books will remain indispensable, not only for literature but for any circumstances in which one needs to read carefully, not only in order to receive information but also to speculate and to reflect about it.

I found this quote from the article interesting. By being slashdotted, thousands of people are reading Eco at the moment. The slashdotters are actively engaged in trying to think of something clever to say for mod points. The blanket statement that people reflect when reading books, and don't with the net isn't quite true. People are engaged a little bit differently.

Re:Archives and Comtemplation

[tomknight]

File incompatability? Try hardware incompatability!

My old Amstrad PC1512 can read and write 5 1/4" floppies, but I don't even know if it works any more. 3 1/2" floppies will die a death soon enough, and the CD...? Who knows. In fifty years time even your latest super duper spanky-wank data storage medium might just be a lump of worthless crud.

Looking at file incompatabilty you might want to think about space mission tapes that can't be read because no-one's alive who know the decoding/reading system. Lots on ones and zeros, meaning nothing to anyone - a pity, seeing as now we have a better chance of using the data meaningfully, if only we could get to it.... Tom.

Re:Archives and Comtemplation

[yintercept]

I did not say file and hardware incompatibilities do not exist...just that we are not suffering the possibility of loss of our culture. Once data is on the network, the hardware problems become less severe. When one program replaces another, you migrate the data to the new servers.

The problems we will have with electronic media probably will have more to do with reinterpretation during the transfer. These same problems occurred with monks transcribing works. First they chose which works to keep and which to toss out, and they "corrected" the mistakes that they saw.

Far more information today is being recorded on long lived media formats than ever before at any time.

Re:Archives and Comtemplation

[Mac Degger]

"People are engaged a little bit differently."

I think that's the whole point Eco is trying to make; perceprion changes the way you think. There is a huge difference between trying to think up something pithy to say on some website and a well thought out, argumented case about something profound (to the individual or the masses).

Sure, both can happen on the net, but even so that is a fleeting thing; because paper is tangible, the connections made in the brain are stronger and the thought process is geared more towards the long term than the next hundred people viewing the frontpage.

It boils down to tangibility...some read from something one doesn't/cannot physically hold (billboard, monitor) is processed differently than something one does hold (paper, book, palmpilot).

But Eco goes deeper, and he's right...until we get a RAM reading device (in the sence that it is randomly accessible to a point where we know kinda where we acces it...ie a book made of e-ink [just like flipping pages of a book]) books will provide for better (not more!) food for thought than electronic memory.

Re:Archives and Comtemplation

[Mac Degger]

CD-R's, contarary to popular belief (or at least manufacturers claims) only last about a year or two.

So what long term storage where you talking about specifically (and I mean ones people actiually use,,,tapes don't count either due to magnetic losses over time)?

Re:Archives and Comtemplation

[yintercept]

I see our difference now. When talking of archiving, you are thinking of a single media. I think of archiving as a process. Archiving involves making multiple copies, routine maintenance and a process for copying the data to new drives if the media is deteriorating. Good archiving involves making copies in multiple cities.

I don't know if you ever heard of a thing called a RAID drive, or mirrored servers. They use multiple copies and various check sum techniques to restore data if a single disk fails. RAID isn't simply a medium, it is a process.

Digital media lends itself to an archival process because it is easy to copy.

Even with paper, archiving depends on a process. The manuscripts from the ancients (the Bible, Aristotle, Plato...) had been transcribed several times and the originals lost. Archiving information for centuries require a process. The process generally involves making multiple copies and storing the copies in multiple cities.

Most of the books that are a 100 years old are really in horrible condition. Paper deteriorates. The printing press is a great archiving machine. You print 10,000 copies and perhaps 10 will be legible two hundred years later.

Archiving also involves establishing context. The problems with a lot of programs or just data on a CD is that the data on the CD has lost its context. You need a process to maintain the context.

The one problem with long term archival processes is that you are depending on future generations to maintain the process. That happens regardless of whether or not you are looking at paper, digital media or carvings in stone.

The main point of my post, however, was that in the last 10 years, I suspect more information has been printed on archival quality papers or entered into archival quality digital processes than at any time in history. The majority of what was printed or written a hundred years ago has vanished, even though it was printed on paper. The majority of stuff we do today will vanish, but we have a hundred thousand times more stuff in archival quality forms than people had a thousand years ago. We are not under archived.

Re:Archives and Comtemplation

[ishark]

CD-R's, contarary to popular belief (or at least manufacturers claims) only last about a year or two.

BAD CD-Rs. I have 5-year old backups which are still perfectly readable (not that this will prevent me from moving everything to DVD-R soon), but I use TDK and not unbranded CDRs.

Books and Further Thinking

[mopslik]

The article is interesting, but I cringed when I saw this point:

First of all, we know that books are not ways of making somebody else think in our place; on the contrary, they are machines that provoke further thoughts.

Ideally this is true, and it's the expected opinion of Eco, who makes his living off of the written word. In reality, though, books often do little to promote further thinking. I need only think back to my time as a TA, when many students wouldn't understand how to solve a particular problem because they couldn't simply look it up in a textbook. Even when a solution was there for them to find, most would simply duplicate the answer without understanding the thought-process behind it. Even today, a significant portion of co-workers wouldn't try to figure out a non-trivial problem because they feel as if it's a waste of time, and surely there's already an answer written up somewhere for them to find. The new human nature, I guess.

While this has more to do with information itself than with the benefits of paper vs. electronic memory, the mere fact that so much information is recorded on one form or another has significantly altered the mind-set of today's generation. A great number of us really are allowing others to think for us. While Eco rightly suggests that books are limited in their abilities, namely they can only record and not compute, I feel that they often promote less thinking.

Re:Books and Further Thinking

[freeweed]

I feel that they often promote less thinking

You and a lot of educated people back when the printing press was invented.

Before this, most information was passed down verbally, and people couldn't just "look up" an answer to a problem - they had to figure it out for themselves. 15/16th century academics often worried that mass availability of printed material would stop people from thinking for themselves, because all the answers were available on paper.

I've heard of schools fighting against textbooks even into the 20th century for this very reason. Of course, once the publishers started using kickbacks, we all acquiesced :)

Re:Books and Further Thinking

[mopslik]

I've heard of schools fighting against textbooks even into the 20th century for this very reason.

Now that's just silliness. In my opinion, what kids need to learn is how to effectively use those books. Obviously, it's pointless to require each student to construct his/her own atomic analyser to find out properties of specific atoms, when a table would be more than sufficient. I fear that many teachers simply resort to saying "look it up", producing the effect I lamented about earlier.

What teachers need to do -- and to be fair, many do indeed do this -- is to teach kids that books can give you answers, but being able to interpret, analyze and apply those answers is the more important goal.

Let's not even mention Google...

Re:Books and Further Thinking

[stephanruby]

This is especially true for American school textbooks. I was educated in France and our books were nowhere as thick and as detailed as your textbooks.

Re:Books and Further Thinking

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually I see it even worse online with the new hyper spoiled generation, used to getting their warez for free, working perfectly with no hassle whatsoever.
Thinking for themselves, solving problems, trying to fix things, is not even on the map.
Looking things up, even with google, is a last desperate resort that they usually don't even think to take.
They want someone to do things for them, fix it, and fix it now! Or if that's not possible they wan't someone to personally hold them by the hand every step. Even if there already is a manual out there with step by step instructions they can't digest it unless someone chews it and spood feeds them bit by bit.

Re:Books and Further Thinking

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because authors of American textbooks gets paid by the letter. Great idea, isn't it?

I'd like to dream that long after...

[Anonymous Coward]

...the last book is printed, there will be some even more wonderful way for really smart people to make me feel dumb. I'd like to believe that I will feel just as stupid when Umberto Eco is beaming directly into my brain.

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[tomknight]

Check out the AHDS.

Tom.

read the article, buster

[misterpies]

It's clear from all the posts so far that I'm the only person to actually read the article.

Eco is not interested in the physical difference between paper and electronic media. He doesn't discuss problems of compatibility or the possibilities of electronic paper. His article is about the evolution of *what* we write, not how we write it.

The way in which the online world frees us from the single author, linear narratives of books and opens the door to multifaceted collaborative efforts (he doesn't mention wikis, but he seems to have got the idea). He thinks about what effect this will have on authorship and envisages the process as being akin to a jazz riff, slightly different every time depending on what the participants bring to it, rather than the single vision of an auteur.

It is indeed an insightful and thought provoking article by one of the world's leading philosophers. And frankly, it's not something you can even begin to comment on until you read it. Which makes me wonder how it got onto /. in the first place.

Re:read the article, buster

[Anonymous Coward]

It's clear from all the posts so far that I'm the only person to actually read the article

It's clear from your post that you don't know what a joke is.

Re:read the article, buster

[dcobbler]

We do that a lot, don't we?
We get obsessed with the technology that's changing how we do things and then we completely ignore the effects of that technology until we are well into the change. IMHO, that's because we're always trying to get new technology to do the same old things "faster" and "easier". It's usually the iconoclasts/rebels/weirdos/(your favourite label here) who are the first to point out that the new tech can do things we've never thought of.

I wouldn't presume to reduce Eco's complex discourse down to this simple conclusion but I do believe that's part of what he's getting at.

Re:read the article, buster

[aussersterne]

Also note the other (and for me much more insightful) assertion that Eco makes: we value "inflexible" texts like books, scrolls, obelisks precisely because they are so inflexible...

Jazz is lovely for some entertainment, but is a poor substitute for fate and destiny, which we project onto the libraries of printed matter in ways that we cannot project onto the Internet, precisely because on the Internet, we create the content, even if not in the HTML, in the hyper-reading. Wherever I am the author (and every hyper-reader in some sense becomes his own author), fate and destiny have been killed by my own will.

In some cases (i.e. the encyclopedic search), this is helpful. In others (i.e. meaning making, metaphysics, the desire for a collective memory) it is not.

Interesting.

Re:read the article, buster

[dvdeug]

We get obsessed with the technology that's changing how we do things and then we completely ignore the effects of that technology until we are well into the change. IMHO, that's because we're always trying to get new technology to do the same old things "faster" and "easier".

IMO, it's because we can't see the future. A lot of people make a lot of lame guesses at what a technology might do, and a few get it right, but no one can truly see what's going on until it's behind us. However, "faster" and "easier" doesn't require Gypsy blood and training in the dark arts, nor does it require your customers to believe you have that.

Re:read the article, buster

[argent]

"The way in which the online world frees us from the single author, linear narratives of books and opens the door to multifaceted collaborative efforts"

you don't need electronic media to do that. All you need is a mimeo and postage stamps. Collaborative works by amateur press associations date back to the '60s at least. They started out with fanzines, but most of the variations in discourse that we see on the web today evolved, albeit slowly, through the '70s and the early '80s until bulletin board systems let people communicate faster...

Alas, the bulletin board systems left little lasting mark on the world, because like the internet they were ephemeral. But the APAs and Zines before them are still around, in attics and basements.

Why don't you go have a look now, if you weren't around, maybe your parents were old-time fans? Ask them. Perhaps it's not too late to recover some of the pre-history of this kind of medium before it gets mainstreamed and people start thinking that folks twenty or thirty years behind the leading edge invented it.

Do you see dead people too?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me first start off by saying that everyone has the potential to see a spirit. Maybe that will happen once just briefly or it could happen many times, but the thing to remember is that everyone can see them given the right factors.

Why only some people will see a ghost in a certain location can be explained in many ways but let me put it in simple real world terms that most people will understand. Let's pretend you and two friends are in the woods and you all have AM/FM radios with you. You are all standing side by side and each of you is trying to tune in a very weak signal from some small radio station. Your one friend has a great radio and they easily tune in the station clearly. Your other friend has an average model radio and they can get the signal briefly but it is filled with static. Your radio is the cheap model and you cannot get the station tuned in at all. Even though you are all standing next to each other and trying to tune in the same station you are getting three different results. Now picture each person as a "radio" that can "receive" the signals that a spirit is transmitting. One person may get the spirits signal string and they will see the spirit. The next person is not as tuned in and they may see something briefly but they may not be able to make out all the details. The third person cannot receive the spirit's signal at all and will not see anything. Hopefully this gives you an idea of how this tends to work. Each person is actually a receiver of the signals or energy that a spirit gives off. Sometimes the signal can be tuned in and other times in cannot.

There are varying conditions that may interfere with the spirits "radio signal" and may only let people with really good "radios" see them. We call these people sensitives or psychics. They are able to tune in more often to the spirits and see, hear, feel, etc. the signal and energy the spirit is sending. Some locations may make some people more sensitive than other locations and they will see something in just those places while they will see nothing in others. Sometimes even the people who have the "cheap radio" can get a brief signal tuned in and that is what happens when someone who has never seen anything all of a sudden has their once in a lifetime ghost sighting. Some of the things that can make our ability to receive these signals are our relation to the spirits, how comfortable we are in a location and our frame of mind at the time, etc. For example many people just see the spirits in their home and no where else. This is where the person is probably the most relax and comfortable and that will raise their ability to receive the signals. If the spirit is a relative or a friend you are already on that "frequency" so you will be more likely to be able to tune into that spirit.

Hopefully I haven't confused you all with the radio and signal talk but it really does seem to be that we are sort of receivers or spirit "signals" and this is the explanation is use at all the lectures and most people seem to understand it better this way than going into all the theories.

Required reading

[harriet nyborg]

on preview what scrotch said.

double plus good scrotch.

even if you dont' manage the whole article, just this paragraph is worth reading:

"Yet, there is a difference between implementing the activity of producing infinite and unlimited texts and the existence of already produced texts, which can perhaps be interpreted in infinite ways but are physically limited. In our same contemporary culture we accept and evaluate, according to different standards, both a new performance of Beethoven's Fifth and a new Jam Session on the Basin Street theme. In this sense, I do not see how the fascinating game of producing collective, infinite stories through the Net can deprive us of authorial literature and art in general. Rather, we are marching towards a more liberated society in which free creativity will coexist with the interpretation of already written texts. I like this. But we cannot say that we have substituted an old thing with a new one. We have both."

Re:RTFA?

[Araneas]

No doubt the people who have RTFA have a similar opinion when told to RTFM.

RTFM?
Not bloody likely.
What a load of wind. Tried reading the manual from the top. Tried browsing for tidbits on how to print my document. I REALLY doubt anyone trying to use this progamme will be able to understand the documentation.

Eco was lecturing at Bibliotheca Alexandrina not Comdex. I suspect he chose his words to reflect his audience.

Please tell me if I am going crazy?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a fetish. I would like a hot, blonde girl in an SS uniform whip my ass until it bleeds and the fuck me hard with a strap-on dildo on a model of a King Tiger tank.

Re:Please tell me if I am going crazy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. Ask Dan Savage.

Re:Please tell me if I am going crazy?

[Anonymous Coward]

"on a model of a King Tiger tank" !!!!!!!

Man, that's CRAZY.
Do it on a real King Tiger tank.

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[wideBlueSkies]

I've got plaintext dating back to 1985(my early programs and school papers). Now stored on CD-ROM, brought over from the original floppies.

I always thought that proprietary formats were going to be trouble, so I always kept a copy of my stuff in plaintext. Lotus 123 was exported to CSV. Wordperfect 5.1 exported to plaintext, etc.

This stuff is still usable. I recently dug back into some analysis I did in 1991 for a CICS system and pulled out an outline and some paragraphs that kind of suited the J2EE project I'm working on now. Sure some editing needs to be done, but a lot of the concepts are the same.

Sure, 17 years isn't a LONG time. But I figure that as long as I'm religious about backups and finding 'some way' to bring the text forward to new tech as time marches on, I'll be able to continue to enjoy reading and using all my old stuff.

I used to write some really stupid looking comments when I was a kid writing COBOL and PL/1. ;)

wbs.

the english version?!

[mydigitalself]

"We have also known another kind of memory, the vegetal one, the one represented by the first papyruses, again well known in this country, and then on books, made of paper. Let me disregard the fact that at a certain moment the vellum of the first codices were of an organic origin, and the fact that the first paper was made with rugs and not with wood. Let me speak for the sake of simplicity of vegetal memory in order to designate books."

i'm all for good english, but some people are really so far up their own asses that they have to write content that you need a frikking dictionary open at all times to read!

Re:the english version?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Learn more words then.

Re:the english version?!

[Anonymous Coward]

this is a cute comment, cause sometimes i feel like i'm not geek enough to read /.

however, i feel that many of us know about the instability of electronic storage and mediums, implicitly. what was the scare of the millenium bug (mostly false) scare but a way to save space 25 years ago? and try reading old files in a new word processor.

innovation hates backwards compatability.

Re:the english version?!

[mydigitalself]

oh, it said "designate"... you know sometimes when a word just sounds and looks wrong?! i wonder if thats because his sentence:

"Let me speak for the sake of simplicity of vegetal memory in order to designate books" could quite easily have read "For the sake of simplicity let us assume that books are made from paper" or something.

Re:the english version?!

[PhukLunix]

Please, it's like asking the one of the best chefs in the world to prepare mac & cheese. Umberto Eco doesn't write simple texts. Simply because he can do better than that. He's an educated man and he express himself like an educated man. If you don't have to vocabulary to deal with the way he writes you have to choices : learn new words and understand what he has to say or don't learn new words and go read CNN the words are easier. Just don't ask for the "for dummy" version. There won't be any.

Re:the english version?!

[mydigitalself]

i'm not sure i entirely agree with your sentiment. i friend of mine is a total maths genius. many a time i have watched him explain a complex mathematical principle to someone who doesn't quite understand it. he breaks it down into the most basic of explanations and i have never seen anyone leave his company without understanding the problem they took to him.

a brilliant author can write as elegant a paper without having to make it complex to read. brilliance is not only a measure of your thoughts, but equally - if not more so - a measure of how your thoughts are articulated for consumption.

Re:the english version?!

[SpacePunk]

I differ. Like everything, even writing comes down to the age old saying "If you can't dazzle them with your brilliance, baffle them with bullshit."

IMHO, he is long winded and writes complicated on purpose. If he wrote without using obscure phraseology then his texts would be much shorter and easier to understand. He doesn't want to be understood easily, he wants people to say "Gee, he's a smart guy!" This seems to be a mark of the 'new age' writer. His texts just drag out. Much like how Stephen King takes a story that can just as well fit 35 pages, and draws it out to fill 600. The both of them produce nothing but yawners.

Re:the english version?!

[PhukLunix]

Maybe your friend look like a genius to you. just saying...

Re:the english version?!

[Jonathan]

IMHO, he is long winded and writes complicated on purpose. If he wrote without using obscure phraseology then his texts would be much shorter and easier to understand. He doesn't want to be understood easily, he wants people to say "Gee, he's a smart guy!" This seems to be a mark of the 'new age' writer. His texts just drag out. Much like how Stephen King takes a story that can just as well fit 35 pages, and draws it out to fill 600. The both of them produce nothing but yawners.

Although the movies, television, etc have tended to make people forget this, the point of a piece of literature isn't to tell a story as quickly as possible. In fact, great works of literature like Joyce's Ulysses have hardly any story at all. If story or entertainment is all you want from a book, you are missing out. It really is fulfilling to track down references in literature that you don't get right away. They make you learn more about the culture we live in, which in many ways is as important as learning scientific facts about the universe we live in.

An the irony is that Eco is really "literature light". He's much more accessible than, for example, James Joyce or Thomas Pynchon

Re:the english version?!

[John.Thompson]

Eco is a scholar; it should be no surprise that he should speak as one. Is it not embarrassing that an Italian can speak English better than a native speaker?

Re:the english version?!

[SpacePunk]

" If story or entertainment is all you want from a book"

Yes, from fiction, and information from non-fiction. Anything else is the equivalent of literary lollygagging and/or loitering. Any putz can lollygag and/or loiter. Not just anybody can put it down on paper to tell a story, entertain, or pass information without lollygagging. Eco just simply isn't one of those people that can, and neither was Joyce.

If I wanted to go on a scavenger hunt I'd look for a scavenger hunt. Literature shouldn't be one.

Re:the english version?!

[Jonathan]

Let me give an analogy from science education. When I was an undergraduate, I was annoyed by my chemistry professor because he never really explained how to do the problems on the homework. Surely, I thought, a good professor would be someone who wouldn't beat around the bush but would explain things directly. Now I realize that he was trying to make us *think* about chemistry. Just telling us how to do the problems wouldn't do that. Great literature makes us think too. It really is more than just entertainment.

Re:the english version?!

[m0rphin3]

I've only got High school, English is my second language, I live in a non-English country, and yet, I understood every word. Why? Because I have read literature. If Eco was discussing code and you didn't understand anything, you'd keep your mouth shut for fear of getting flamed. I thought Slashdot was 'News for Nerds', but apparently the definition of 'Nerd' these days are only sweaty WASPs from engineering and IT.

Re:the english version?!

[mydigitalself]

i think you'll find thats "...friend looks" like..."

just observing...

Re:the english version?!

[SpacePunk]

He essentially made you 'reinvent the wheel'. That is wastefull of time. As they say, "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach."

Re:Real money

[Anonymous Coward]

Why am I not surprised that kuro5hin is advocating Karl Marx's definition of "value".

kuro5hin is by and large an ultra left-wing mouthpiece, short on facts, long on doctrine.

Printing out e-mails is good

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell?

You actually trust electronic media to store stuff that may be crucial if you ever end up in court? I've lost dozens of important e-mails because a) I've deleted them accidentally because I thought they were spam, b) the company server had a total meltdown and the backup policy does not include e-mail that's more than a year old and c) the backup cd-r disc had turned unreadable while stored in its jewel box in a dark drawer.

You don't print out your e-mails? Eugh.

Re:Printing out e-mails is good

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. I even print out my binaries.

Required reading

[nuggz]

Of course the fact that it is a rambled spew of ideas, it definately has something smart to say!

I think it is crap.
It is unclear and confusing.

Some people have this idea that to be smart profound or insightful you need to obscure what you are saying.
I think the real challenge is to say it in such a way that people can understand you. The more clearly you can state a complex idea, the better the author.

Required reading should be clear and understood by all. It should be easy to read. We shouldn't discount people simply because they can't understand some random rambling rant.

(Can you tell I didn't like the article?)

Re:RTFA?

[boa13]

I REALLY doubt anyone around here will be interested enough in this topic to read the article as presented.

I have just done that, no problem, great read. How would you like the article presented to you? With big letters and big, bright, shiny pictures? Yep, Mom probably tells better stories than this old man. But when you'll grow up, maybe you'll understand him.

Re:From the behalf of ECO....

[botzi]

I appologize that he didn't managed to trully overwhelm you with his "essay".
Anyway, may be you should start a petition and he will eventualyl put a little something on buffer overflows in the paper????

Hm...

[gardyloo]

I am, of course, printing this sucker out before I read it.

Re:Hm...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm printing it, and faxing it to a few people who might be interested.

Re:RTFA?

[Anonymous Coward]

I read Foucault's Pendulum.
It's supposed to be confusing, that's the whole point! Getting entangled in age-old conspiration theories, just like the main character in the book.

It's worth a read.

extended criticism...

[X_Caffeine]

The naive question is: "Will hypertextual diskettes, the internet, or multimedia systems make books obsolete?" ...this question is a confused one, since it can be formulated in two different ways: (a) will books disappear as physical objects, and (b) will books disappear as virtual objects?

I'm not going to touch point b, which is an investigation of "hypertext" and multimedia, and most of his observations are pretty interesting. As an academic and a philosopher, he's good at thinking about ideas. However, his opinions on the possibilities of eBooks (which, unfortunately, most literature-industry types will take seriously) are misguided.

After having spent 12 hours at a computer console, my eyes are like two tennis balls... [computers] are incapable of satisfying all the intellectual needs they are stimulating.

The only evidence he offers for this "incapability" is that they make his eyes hurt. What kind of "computer console"? This is really important!

A radiation tube? I hope he had a pair of Clockwork Orange lackeys nearby to administer eyedrops. A desktop LCD? Better on the eyes, but still bad on the back. A laptop is OK, but it pretty much has to stay on the stomach. A tablet PC is even better still, but still to unweildy.

(and don't get me started on "eBook readers," btw... nobody ever suggested that you should carry a separate PDA for an address book, and another for a calendar, and another for a to-do list; dedicated ebook readers are clearly insane and should be disregarded. That Eco doesn't dismiss them outright shows how little he understands gadgetry and human interface engineering.)

But what about PDAs? Simple, unassuming backlit LCDs? Granted, they're mostly too small for truly comfortable reading (I think there's a huge, untapped market for a PDA the size of a "trade paperback"), but they're damned close.

I've read many novels and stories on PDAs (and even one short novel on my cellphone); after reading the Harry Potter books on their Palm handhelds, my sister and her husband now gripe when something they'd like to read can't be found in an "eBook" format. The husband refuses to touch Stevenson's Quicksilver until he can download it, like he did with a bootleg copy of Cryptonomicon.

Yet, up to now e-books have not proved to be commercially successful as their inventors hoped... In general, people seem to prefer the traditional way of reading a poem or a novel on printed paper.

When the cellular phones were invented in the 1980s and failed to become widely successful in the marketplace, the engineers did not decide that their idea was a poor one and give up. They recognized that their implementation was flawed, and went back to the "drawing board" (or their MS-DOS-driven copies of Autocad, and I'm sure there's a point to be made there someplace).

Indeed, there are a lot of new technological devices that have not made previous ones obsolete... The idea that a new technology abolishes a previous one is frequently too simplistic...

Eco just glossed over the answer. "ebooks" (what a horrible term) will never render all books extinct. They will supplement books.

You know those boxes that photocopier paper come in? I have 25 of those, stuffed full of books. Each box is damned heavy. As you might guess, I'm one of those people who loves books.

Many of them -- autographed ones, first editions, books with sentimental value -- I would never give up. But I don't want to (or intend to) part with any of them (I reread nearly all of them). What I'd like is to put 85% of them onto digital media. I just don't need hardcopies of murder mysteries, or pulp sci-fi. Even some of the really good stuff, the Camus and Nabakov and Faulkner, I just don't need to haul around these paperbacks for the rest of my life.

Modern literature is usually published in two phases, an expensive hardback, and then a consumer paperback. When I'd like to see is the later phase supplemented with digital copies. Nobody who's a fan of these suggests a "death of the book." No way. Just a death of some of them, and in the process, making them cheaper and more ubiquitous.

Re:extended criticism...

[Anonymous Coward]

You have 25 photocopier paper boxes full of books, and you think that's a lot?

Trust me, you're more of a reader than most of the /. crowd, but your library is still relatively modest. I can't remember the last time my books would fit in that many small boxes. My technical books alone, a very small % of my reading, filled about 11 of those boxes when I moved jobs a year ago.

(Mind you, good choice for boxes. Any bigger and the box tends not to actually be portable...)

Re:extended criticism...

[argent]

I agree entirely. What I find most surprising of all this debate over "the future of books" is that there is a debate at all. There should be nothing controversial about the idea that this is just another format for publishing, but somehow even intelligent people get digital media, hypertext, and the web mixed up and write scholarly treatises on nothing at all.

Re:extended criticism...

[bluGill]

Those two phases annoy me. I have discovered many books over the years that I love. When I destory 1 paperback from re-reading it, I know that it is time to invest in the hardcover. Too bad they no longer publish it. I'd pay full price for a few books in hardcover. I bought the Compelte Hitchhikers Guide, as soon as it came out. I consider it my duty to support good authors for good works by paying full price. I do not support good authors for poor sequels (which most do a ton of), though I will get them from the library.

I agree though that the paperback pahse should be in eBook format too. I've been considering baan's ebook subscription for a while now.

WHO CARES!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's just a Umberto Eco story... not an disguised advertisment or something...

Best Argument in Favor of Electronic

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

In Umberto's case, the best argument against paper is that you won't accidentally poison yourself turning the pages of an electronic document.

Re:Best Argument in Favor of Electronic

[rinderpestofshank]

hey , that is really funny. but he also says that reading of a computer screen hurts his eyes (blinding), -->could it be a subtle reference to 'Name OT Rose Part 2' where the computer geek who reads off a computer screen is killed, by a braile-terminal hacker-guru who does not want him to read Knuth Volume 5 ?

Re:Best Argument in Favor of Electronic

[mister_tim]

Sounds like Snow Crash. Maybe, following your logic, Snow Crash is The Name of the Rose Part 2, except with a bit more hacking and a bit less postmodern semiotics.

Re:Real money

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe you should consult a non-linear vellum of vegetate work and reread the definition of irony

GWB on a surprise visit to Iraq! Breaking news!

[Anonymous Coward]

GWB is paying a surprise visit to the US troops in Iraq.

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[mikerich]

Some of da Vinci's works may be lost to time.

The best estimate is that at least 75% of Leonardo's writings have been destroyed or lost since his lifetime. Most of the surviving codices are actually rebindings of his work which have been salvaged from elsewhere.

Then there is the problem that Leonardo hardly ever finished anything - he loved procrastinating work, so its hard to know if some works attributed to his pupils are actually overpaintings of Leonardo's work. he hardly ever signed anything, so a good number of paintings (and some sculptures) are suspected of being Leonardo's work, but it can't be proven.

And he kept experimenting - most famously in the case of The Last Supper in Milan. Leonardo wanted to paint with oils for their intense colouration, but did not want to use the traditional fresco technique of applying paint to wet plaster (Leonardo rarely worked for a long period of time - so the plaster would have dried before he completed the work).

So he invented an oil-based paint that could be applied to dried plaster. And it looked magnificent - contemporaries were in awe of the work - for a few years, but Leonardo's formulation did not bind to the plaster and the paint began to crumble from the plaster. The painting was then restored a number of times - quite crudely, which made a big difference to the work.

So if you are in Milan, go and see The Last Supper - it is a work of extraordinary beauty and power (and size), but it is a faint shadow of the original.

Leonardo also lost a lot of work thanks to his choice of patrons, most notably Ludovico Sforza, tyrant of Milan between 1480 and 1499. Ludovico hired Leonardo ostensibly to create a massive 8m high statue of a horse to commemorate Frederico Sforza, the dynasty's founder.

Well Leonardo being Leonardo, he didn't work terribly quickly and got side-tracked, spending much of his time producing the majority of his known paintings, designing fortifications for Milan, a giant crossbow and starting his obsession with geology.

In 1499, the French invaded Lombardy to settle their claim for the dukedom of Milan. Sforza lost the battle and fled - Leonardo took his opportunity to leave as well.

What he didn't take was the full-sized model of his horse. The clay model was destroyed by Gascon bowmen and reduced to rubble. In recent years, an American team have created a pair of monumental bronze horses inspired by the original. One is in Michigan, the other in Milan - I saw the latter one this summer - and in a word - WOW!

And just think, this is Leonardo da Vinci we are talking about, what has been lost from less-well-known artists? What about the collected works of the Library of Alexandria, the libraries of the Caliphate of Baghdad, Rome...?

Best wishes,
Mike.

Nuclear conspiracies...

[Anonymous Coward]

Your theory is that intelligence agents of an unmentioned superpower (presumably the US) will plant a nuclear device at some point in 2004 perhaps two months before the US presidential elections, causing complete panic in the US, overwhelming victory for the oligarchs, instant application of Patriot II and internment of all those who oppose the march towards totalitarianism?

Perhaps you think that Bush already warned Blair that this might happen and that he would be lucky if London was not the target? And maybe the smear campaign against France has a more sinister goal than simply distracting attention from a the petrowars?

What has all this got to do with paper except that by the time the oligarchs have finished with us we will be lucky if we can still find the stuff?

Re:Nuclear conspiracies...

[Anonymous Coward]

> presumably the US

Or one of their clients, such as Israel...

> and that he would be lucky if London was not the target ...or the UK.

> Perhaps you think that Bush already warned Blair

What makes you think that Bush would know about it ahead of time. He doesn't need to.

> And maybe the smear campaign against France

I'm in the UK. Any smear campaign against it from the US doesn't count for much over here.

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[Theatetus]

what about all the data that is lost forever because there is simply not enough paper to record it on

Well, from what I've read of Eco he would consider that one of paper's chief advantages. When preserving information is more difficult, you only record things worth recording, rather than the pointless dataglutting that we do today.

I'll check that book out

[Anonymous Coward]

One might argue that Chinese pictograms are somewhat less abstract that Latin characters. I wonder if it is an essential element. The delusion that we are the center of the universe has been a benefit and comes from the lies of our cognition not our language. I just believe the Chinese culture has been around long enough to more fully realize this. In any case, I will be checking out the book.

Re:I'll check that book out

[kalidasa]

Chinese characters are not pictograms, they're logograms. They ultimately derive from pictograms. On the problems with this discussion in general, see Wardy's *Aristotle in China*.

Long term electronic storage

[penguinoid]

Er, what if we store the information Knoppix CDs, and include the programs necessary to read it? CDs don't rot, do they?

Re:Long term electronic storage

[Anonymous Coward]

CDs will degrade - CDRWs quicker than professionally mastered discs, due to dye degradation (lifetimes of less than two years have been recorded).

But even an ordinary CD has a lifetime measured in decades rather than centuries - the polycarbonate substrate will eventually die, in roughly the same timescale as acid paper.

Hugo the Seer

[randmairs]

Eco synthesized from Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris: "The book will distract people from their most important values, encouraging unnecessary information, free interpretation of the Scriptures, insane curiosity."

Hugo forsaw porn, spam, cults, and Slashdot!!!

I hope you have an enjoyable Thanskgiving.

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[crawling_chaos]

You didn't answer the question about the Library of Alexandria. Data on paper is just as easily lost. Not to mention that it was blind luck that the Rosetta Stone survived and was found. Without it, all of those Egyptian Hieroglyphs would be just so many pretty pictures.

If you want something to survive for a long time, it seems to me that the best strategy is to make as many copies as possible, in as many formats as possible. Unfortunately with money, copies aren't often as useful as the original, and can even get you in trouble.

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[Greedo]

FYI, a very good read on the problem with microfiche storage is Nicholson Baker's book Double Fold.

From the publisher:

Since the 1950's, our country's greatest libraries have, as a matter of common practice, dismantled their collections of original bound newspapers and so-called brittle books, replacing them with microfilmed copies. The marketing of the brittle-paper crisis and the real motives behind it are the subject of this passionately argued book, in which Nicholson Barker pleads the case for saving our recorded heritage in its original form while telling the story of how and why our greatest research libraries betrayed the public trust by auctioning off or pulping irreplaceable collections. The players include the Library of Congress, the CIA, NASA, microfilm lobbyists, newspaper dealers, and a colorful array of librarians and digital futurists, as well as Baker himself -- who eventually discovers that the only way to save one important newspaper is to buy it. Double Fold is an intense, brilliantly worded narrative that is sure to provoke discussion and controversy.

Stuff my face with pizza

[Anonymous Coward]

In a few moments I will:

a) Eat two pizzas.
b) Drift off into a carbohydrate stupour.
c) Enjoy TV all night long on a couch only getting up to relieve myself and to get something to drink.

Life is good!

Better dont try

[Anonymous Coward]

you can electrocute yourself

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[Trigun]

a surprisingly high amount of culture is going to vanish before it enters the public domain

Let's just hope it's Hip-hop culture that gets lost first.

Re:RTFA?

[Artifakt]

At the least, he was assuming everyone present knew what Postmodernism and Deconstruction mean in academics. I think he was assuming everyone present would understand a sort of line he was drawing about the ambiguous meanings that can result from deconstruction technique, as otherwise his point degenerates into a straw man arguement, but I'm not at all sure on that - maybe he crossed the line.

Great men, stupid errors

[infolib]

It's reassuring to see that even such a great literate as Umberto Eco can make stupid mistakes:

Plato was writing ... more or less 14 centuries later Victor Hugo ... narrated the story of a priest

Plato died ca. 347 BC, Victor Hugo wrote in the 19th century, so it's 22 not 14.

Take that as a cautonary note for next time you feel smart: you're just one neuronal glitch away from stupidity...

Re:Great men, stupid errors

[Gramie2]

David: "It's such a fine line between stupid an'..."
Derek: " . . .and clever."

How true.

Re:One more step to complete money disaster

[Anonymous Coward]

Money is always an abstraction.

It doesn't matter if it is barter-trade, based on gold, paper money or completely digital currency. It's still abstract because you can't really create value - you can only make people believe that there is value to the small nugget/bill/credit card smartcard chip.

I like it that way. I want curency to be easy to manipulate, inflate and destroy if necessary. Speculating on value is true market economy.

Books are linear, writing isn't!

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because one word comes after another doesn't mean books are any more or less linear than hypertext. Many authors tell non-linear stories despite the linear nature of books. Just like painters use perspective to present 3 dimensions despite a 2-D medium.

Reading: on screen, paper, clay

[G4from128k]

The presumption that paper is better for extended reading is increasingly less valid. Since a got a large LCD display a few years ago, I find that I seldom print pages anymore. I still like and buy some physical books (fewer than before), but I miss the features afforded by accessing stuff in a digital format. Paper still has higher resolution and physical portability, but this relative advantage is waning.

I'm sure that paper vs. clay arguments raged in the early days of paper. Paper was flimsy, flammable, and cheap. Clay was solid, serene, and worthy of keeping. A similar set of arguments now embroils the screen vs. paper debate.

In a few decades, I'd bet that most people will consider paper an anachronism -- hardcopy being too inflexible, bulky, and expensive to use in everyday life. Better screens and from-birth exposure to the advantages of virtual access will lower people's nostalgia for and use of paper. Paper will never go away (after all, we still carve stone tablets) but paper will be marginalized. The percentage of content read on the screen will only increase.

Re:Reading: on screen, paper, clay

[TALlama]

Oh, come on: you've seen SciFi movies!

Paper goes away and is replaced by transparencies, which we read instead!

Money and value

[nuggz]

Money (Dollars, Euro, Yen) has as much value as gold, arguably more.

As long as this abstract item can get you sometihng you want, it has value.
The reason I think a standard currency is more valuable is I can get more stuff with it.

If you try to get something electricity, a tv, a car, a hooker, they will likely require money, not a lump of metal.

Money itself has no real value, but as long as enough people accept it, it will work.

BTW, you can't "redeem" dollars for gold, the gold standard is gone, why do you think the price of it fluctuates so much?

Re:Money and value

[evilviper]

As long as this abstract item can get you sometihng you want, it has value.

Yes, but the parent poster's point was essentially: how long will it retain it's value? It certainly is a good point (if quite a bit over-dramatic) as we've seen incredible inflation, long and short-term. An interesting point, is that you shouldn't even bother saving-up for retirement until you are in your 40s, or so, because a month's worth of pay when you're 20, will just about be the equivalent of a day's pay when you're about 70.

If you try to get something electricity, a tv, a car, a hooker, they will likely require money, not a lump of metal.

I don't know anyone that advocates carrying precious metals around, to pay for daily items. Rather, they are meant as a substitute for bank savings accounts, where the value of the metals will retain more value than your money would, including interest. With that, you can cash-in gold/silver pieces just as easily as you can make a withdrawl from a bank (easier in some cases, depending on how crappy your bank is).

If you want to be a die-hard and carry around gold coins, you can. At worst, you'll just have to walk a block down the street to your local jeweler to cash-in the metals, and then go back to the store that requires cash.

Re:Money and value

[nuggz]

The value of gold has remained constant (long term, adjusting for inflation)

If you want an inflation adjusted investment, buy an I bond, or a company.
Not saving for retirement is a bad idea. You can still easily double your money after inflation.

Re:Money and value

[evilviper]

The value of gold has remained constant (long term, adjusting for inflation)

And where are you getting this information that contradicts the universally-accepted facts?

If you want an inflation adjusted investment, buy an I bond, or a company.

Gold doesn't go belly-up. Gold keeps it's value better than just about anything else, without any risk at all.

Not saving for retirement is a bad idea.

I never said anything of the sort... Just that: A) Starting to save too early is not very productive.
B) Savings Account interest doesn't cut it.

Re:Money and value

[nuggz]

The value of gold has remained constant (long term, adjusting for inflation)
And where are you getting this information that contradicts the universally-accepted facts?

I have not even heard of your universally accepted fact, let alone accepted it.
I got my information from several financial history resources (sites and articles and data).

Gold keeps its value, only keeps its value.
I bonds grow in value, companies (if selected properly) also grow.

A) Starting to save early is very very productive. Compound interest is a very powerful tool.
B) No savings accounts don't cut it.

Re:RTFA?

[tiled_rainbows]

I know Foucault's Pendulum was supposed to be confusing. I don't think it was supposed to be boring, though.

Aha! He knows what "hacker" means:

[NickFitz]

I have been told that some hackers, grown up on computers and unused to browsing books, have finally read great literary masterpieces on e-books...

Nice change to see somebody outside the nerd world using the word correctly. Anybody here prepared to admit to being 'unused to browsing books'? :-)

Re:Aha! He knows what "hacker" means:

[Anonymous Coward]

> Anybody here prepared to admit to being 'unused to browsing books'? :-)

Sure, no problem. But you'll have to tell me what a "book" is, first.

Re:Aha! He knows what "hacker" means:

[SlashDread]

He is *so* correct, I have enjoyed The Hitch hiker's Guide SO much on my palm.

"/Dread"

Re:Aha! He knows what "hacker" means:

[m0rphin3]

And why is he not a nerd?
Certainly he knows a lot about an area the public does not. Probably stays up reading books at all hours. Probably he speaks weird languages in his sleep, and he certainly knows a Turing machine.
I'd say (oh, he's fat,too!) he's a nerd.

Freedom of speech in Canada

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not surprised to see that Canada fails at protecting the most precious freedom people can have: the freedom of speech.

If an elected member of the parliament is not allowed to speak freely, how can we have democracy in the first place?

Even here in the US the trend is getting more and more disturbing as Trent Lott's case showed.

Re:One more step to complete money disaster

[dada21]

Your first sentence is completely correct. The rest is all wrong, IMHO.

Money itself never has to have value. Trade originally meant two persons exchanging something they have for something more valuable to them. If you have eggs, and I have dirt, I'll give you enough dirt to get eggs that are more valuable to me than the dirt. But you're getting dirt that is more valuable to you than the eggs.

As Rothbard opined in the link I posted, true money has a free market value that allows indirect bartering. It has a value that is ever changing based on each item you use it to "purchase." It may be 1 grain of gold for eggs today, but when eggs get rare, it may be 3 grains of gold for eggs tomorrow. That is the fantastic reason that gold is the ultimate exchange medium -- gold is rarely created and rarely destroyed enough to change the amount of gold available in the world. Even the gold rush itself didn't change the price of gold in the long run: in 1900, one ounce of gold bought you 300 loaves of bread. In the 70's, the same was true. Even today, one ounce of gold can buy you almost 300 loaves of bread. The dollar in 1900 bought you 15 loaves of bread. Today, it buys you about 1.

Gold is not abstract -- the dollar is.

Al Ahram Weekly

[ElGanzoLoco]

... an egyptian governmental newspaper. Funny thing is, I work at the French version ( they have a daily in arabic, a weekly in english, and one in French...) since almost two months now :)

Nice newspaper, but not one I expected to find on Slashdot's main page!!! That's a fun coincidence!
(and no I didn't submit the article)

Devil is in the details.

[nuggz]

The sad thing is, you can't talk about these issues and neglect the details, because all the devil is in details.

Sure you can, you'd just be wrong. (you forgot that detail)

--
This post is why engineers shouldn't have lunch breaks.

Paper vs. Plastic

[annielaurie]

Although I enjoy owning and handling paper books, I suspect that works in digital format can be made to survive longer. Library holdings (for example) are often crumbling to dust because nobody during most of the 19th and 20th centuries gave a thought to the acid content of papers and inks then in use.

I'll also admit that my Palm has been a good companion on long, tedious business trips; a book housed on a PDA means one less item to be lugged through airports.

Anne

Case study: the Wikipedia

[Anonymous Coward]

Wikipedia is a multilingual, open content, collaboratively developed encyclopedia that is managed and operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. As of September 2003, it covers a wide range of subjects and has over 175,000 articles in English (by its own count). It also has over 150,000 articles in other languages. It covers many different topics.

The project started in English on January 15, 2001, and later projects were started to build Wikipedia in other languages.

There are three essential characteristics of the Wikipedia project, which together define its niche on the World Wide Web:

It is, or aims to become, primarily an encyclopedia.

It is a wiki, in that (with a few exceptions) it can be edited by anyone.

It is open content, and uses the copyleft GNU Free Documentation License.

The project started in English on January 15, 2001, and later projects were started to build Wikipedia in other languages.

The idea to collect all of the world's knowledge within arm's reach under a single roof goes back to the ancient Library of Alexandria and Pergamon.

The Chinese emperor Yongle oversaw the compilation of the Yongle Encyclopedia, one of the largest encyclopedias in history, which was completed in 1408, and comprised of over 11,000 handwritten volumes, of which only 800 now survive.

The early Muslim compilations of knowledge in the middle ages, included many comprehensive works, and much development of what we now call scientific method, historical method and citation.

However, these works were rarely available to more than specialists: they were expensive, and written for those extending knowledge rather than (with some exceptions in medicine) using it. The modern idea of the general purpose widely distributed printed encyclopedia goes back to just a little before Denis Diderot and the 18th century encyclopedists. Major university libraries can be seen as museums of monumental encyclopedic endeavors in various countries. Frequently found titles are the English Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Spanish Enciclopedia Universal Illustrada, the German Meyers Konversations-Lexikon and Brockhaus.

The idea to use automated machinery beyond the printing press to build a more useful encyclopedia can be traced to H. G. Wells' short story of a World Brain (1937) and Vannevar Bush's future vision of the microfilm based Memex, As We May Think (1945). An important milestone along this path is also Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu (1960). Richard Stallman articulated the usefulness of a "Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource" in 1999.

With the development of the Internet, many people attempted to develop online encyclopedia projects. The idea to build a free encyclopedia using the Internet can be traced at least to the late 1980s when it was suggested as part of several "Millennium Projects" including the United Nations University Millennium Project. Various names were suggested including "Encyclopedia Gaia", "Encyclopedia Terra", and although these projects did not proceed very far they kept the idea alive through the early 1990s, where they began to converge with Ted Nelson's ideas about hypertext and similar proposals from K. Eric Drexler.

In 1993, a project called Interpedia was being discussed; it was planned as an encyclopedia on the Internet to which everyone could contribute materials. The project never left the planning stage and it was overtaken by the explosion of the World Wide Web and the emergence of high-quality search engines.

Wikis enables documents to be authored collectively in a simple markup language using a web browser. A single page in a wiki is referred to as a "wiki page", while the entire body of pages, which are usually highly interconnected, is called "the wiki".

"Wiki wiki" means "fast" in the Hawaiian language, and it is the speed of creating and updating pages that is one of the defining aspects of wiki technology. Generally, there is no pr

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[Kirill Lokshin]

What kind of plaintext: ASCII or Unicode? (Rhetorical question, Unicode wasn't around in 1985).

As computers evolve, even non-proprietary formats become problematic. If the underlying tech changes (for instance, the number of bits per character is increased) all the old data must be converted to the new standard to ensure that newer machines can use it. But, if the amount of new data produced increases (due to population growth, etc), the amount of existing data grows exponentially, and it becomes impractical to convert all of it.

You might be able to maintain all of your old records personally, but society as a whole won't be able to keep up with the influx of new information produced.

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[STrinity]

Paper is better than electronic for long term storage.

That's arguably true provided you have a printing press. Anyone who's studied medieval and classical literature knows that paper is a horrible medium when data has to be copied manually -- most things written more than a thousand years ago don't exist today, either through war, disaster, or lack of interest, and those that do survive, have been bowdlerized.

Re:RTFA?

[Garabito]

I didn't like it. The book has a good start (from a geek perspective)

One character comes up with an algorithm to get hidden messages in ancient books by making anagrams of the text on them. The book evens shows a piece of source code to generate all possible anagrams from a single word (well, the source code sucks because it's on early 80's basic and it uses goto's like hell)

But from there, the book begins to decay. It gets boring and silly. The end really sucks.

Something bugs me...

[evilviper]

I'm quite bothered by the fact that he lumped-together computer chips and stone tablets. Sure, I may be nit-picking, but it's really bothering me.

Sure, they are made of vaguely similar materials, but are vastly different... Stone tablets resemble paper scrolls more than computer chips... and computer chips resemble a biological brain more than anything else.

Re:Something bugs me...

[scrotch]

I've found that Eco often makes some seemingly stupid distinctions - like those 3 kinds of memory - in order to get at more important distinctions. His main point here is to discuss the different ways and reasons that we read. He then discusses the effects these distinctions should have on the way we discuss technologies for reading and passing on knowledge.

If you can, attribute that first set of 'weird' stuff to Literature, and concentrate on the meat of the essay later on.

Re:Something bugs me...

[BigBadBri]

There's a certain rationale between his lumping together stone tablets and chips - both are relatively less portable than paper, in the sense that stone is heavy and computers need power to work.

In terms of function, stone tablets resemble paper scrolls, and computer chips resemble erasable scrolls.

Only a brain resembles a brain, no matter what BS the neural net propagandists would have you believe.

The real interest in the essay is further on, where the combinatorial possibilities offered by hypertext are explored (though to be fair, Eco has covered this subject just as well in the past).

"Techology" pedantry

[vruba]

"Technology" does not mean "something new and exciting"; it means "a way of doing something". Think of "technique".

It's blatantly obvious that paper was once a technology, and that it still is. Perhaps it would have been worthwhile to remind us that paper was once a new or high technology.

Re:Book name is "The name of the rose"

[Anonymous Coward]

NUTpick: It's ECO not Ecco's - or maybe you mean the italian restaurant downtown?

Eco's cool, but

[OriginalArlen]

my favourite post-modernist is Jean Baudrillard. I picked up his book 'America' years ago and was completely blown away by it - it's the sort of thing you have to read a sentence at a time because you have to go away and think about it for a few minutes before tackling the next one. Many many people will loathe & detest his style of course but then, that's probably why I like him so much...

Eco misses the whole point.

[Animats]

Eco misses the whole point. The great advantage of online content is searchability. He describes using an encyclopedia in an "advanced way" to find out if Napoleon ever met Kant.

When we query Google for that question, we immediately discover that this 2003 talk by Eco is a rehash of a talk he gave in 1995, and a very similar talk he gave in 1996, and again in 1998, and yet again in 2000 . Each of those talks contains the Napoleon/Kant/encyclopedia example. So Eco has been giving much the same talk for almost a decade now.

A search at Amazon.com reveals that Bertrand Russell compared Napoleon and Kant back in 1935, and mentioned that Kant never travelled more than 10 miles from his home town of Konigsberg, Germany. Eco has presumably read Russell, one of the great philosophers and essayists, and may have lifted the Kant/Napoleon example from Russell.

So we've learned something important about Eco himself, something he didn't tell us. He's less creative and original than he would like us to think. Before Internet searches, it would have taken considerable scholarly research to discover that. Now, anyone can do it in a few minutes.

Re:Eco misses the whole point.

[saforrest]

Eco misses the whole point. The great advantage of online content is searchability. He describes using an encyclopedia in an "advanced way" to find out if Napoleon ever met Kant.

What are you talking about? What in Eco's article made you believe he didn't realize this advantage of hypertext? What point did he miss?

In fact, he makes essentially your point in the article, which leads me to believe you must only have skimmed through it:

In order to confirm this I would probably need to consult a biography of Kant, or of Napoleon, but in a short biography of Napoleon, who met so many persons in his life, a possible meeting with Kant can be disregarded, while in a biography of Kant a meeting with Napoleon would be recorded. In brief, I must leaf through many books on many shelves of my library; I must take notes in order to compare later all the data I have collected. All this will cost me painful physical labour.

Yet, with hypertext instead I can navigate through the whole net-cyclopaedia. I can connect an event registered at the beginning with a series of similar events disseminated throughout the text; I can compare the beginning with the end; I can ask for a list of all words beginning by A; I can ask for all the cases in which the name of Napoleon is linked with the one of Kant; I can compare the dates of their births and deaths -- in short, I can do my job in a few seconds or a few minutes.

Re:Eco misses the whole point.

[scrotch]

He doesn't miss that at all. Read it again. Especially the end of the Napoleon - Kant example:

"Yet, with hypertext instead I can navigate through the whole net-cyclopaedia. ...in short, I can do my job in a few seconds or a few minutes. Hypertexts will certainly render encyclopaedias and handbooks obsolete."

Eco is too complicated to jump to assumptions about what his point is. His point is usually more subtle than most. It's often necessary to read everything he says. The way most people write, you can accurately guess everything else they'll say from the first few sentences. This is generally not the case with Eco or many other academic writers that are able to assume their audience is willing to think about what they're saying.

Re:Eco misses the whole point.

[mnbjhguyt]

So we've learned something important about Eco himself, something he didn't tell us. He's less creative and original than he would like us to think.

You can't say this just by reading one article. Eco (though by many considered just a novelist) is a university teacher, has written many works and also regularly writes on many newspapers.
In a recent article, for example, he was talking about books he read when he was a student, and how much they influenced his later works.
He surely his one author that gives credit where credits is due.
FYI: here's his Curriculum vitae

Re:Eco misses the whole point.

[MobyTurbo]

When we query Google for that question, we immediately discover that this 2003 talk by Eco is a rehash of a talk he gave in 1995 [...] So Eco has been giving much the same talk for almost a decade now.

Why not? After all, his name is Echo, so you'd expect him to repeat what he says a bit. ;-)

Re:Eco misses the whole point.

[wolfdvh]

It seems a poor use of time to come up with a new variant of an example just for the appearance of 'new'.

The Napoleon/Kant example illustrates the point he was making. So why waste effort trying to come up with another way to say it?

The goal behind modern programming is to reuse the debugged bits rather than reinventing the same thing.

We are used to newer is better in technology, and rightly so. However, any profound concept or invention will stand the test of time. As Eco said elsewhere in the article, some items have remained unchanged for centuries because they have approached optimum. Spoons, hammers, and more recently bicycles, have not changed radically in a very long time for that reason.

It is usually best not to buy a new car model in the first year because the refinement that happens from the feedback of the 'early adopters' will make the next years model better. As he continues to speak on this issue that he thinks is worth thinking about, he continues refine it. I prefer that to someone who shoots from the hip and never really thinks about something with enough depth to fully consider it.

Re:Eco misses the whole point.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet another person who apparently didn't read, or failed to understand, the article.

And as usual the peanut gallery rates it up as "Score 5, Insightful" because it echoes what they wish a famous author had said, instead of having to face what he really said.

Please, people, read Ecos article. It's quite lucid. If you don't really get it, please just forget about it and go do something else, but don't post to this slashdot story. It's pointless.

So what's up with ECO?

[Anne_Nonymous]

1. Is he a good writer? Why do you think so or think not?

2. If I'm only going to read one of his books, which one should I pick? Why?

3. What other writers is he similar to, and in what respects?

Re:So what's up with ECO?

[Philageros]

"Foucault's Pendulum" is my favourite book by him. It starts slowly, but when it gets going it's gripping. Also he was interested in computers back then too.

Re:So what's up with ECO?

[BigBadBri]

1. Emphatically, yes! He tells a good story, and brings an academics knowledge of philosophy to his storytelling.

2. I'd start with The Name of the Rose (it's easily digestible in small chunks, while Foucault's Pendulum and The Island of the Day Before demand more careful reading, and I haven't yet made my mind up about Baudolino, as I've only read it once). It is a classic detective story, entertaining, full of interesting titbits about the mindset of mediaeval Europe, and above all a damn good read.

3. I'd compare him with Jorge Luis Borges (the master of the short story, and another explorer of the possibilities of storytelling), Georges Perec (Life, A Users Manual is my favourite book after LOTR), and maybe John Fowles around the time he wrote The Magus. If you read him on a more literal level, Michael Chrichton is similar in some ways, though Eco is a bit deeper.

He's not a bit like William Gibson ;-)

Re:So what's up with ECO?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks BBB. I'll put TNOTR on the reading list for next year.

Anyone else reminded of _The_Diamond_Age_?

[gardyloo]

Eco's point about books (hypertexts, rather) which present a multitude of branches at many points in a "story" reminds me a lot of Stephenson's _The_Diamond_Age_, in which Nell is taught by a book being 'ractored' by people.

Admittedly, at the beginning of the story, the book is more of a video monitor, with moving pictures and sounds and such, but by the end, when she's matured, it's mainly text.

What sort of future can _that_ have?

(P.S. --- a holdover from the "old days"; how many times do you see post-scripta in emails and other hypertexts, when it's so damned easy to just go back and fit those thoughts in where they should go -- like this one! Anyway, I was too lazy to put in hypertextural links to Stephenson, the book, etc.)

Re:Anyone else reminded of _The_Diamond_Age_?

[jgoemat]

Fabulous book, very interesting. I just hate how towards the end it becomes one big war and I didn't really understand who the good guys were or what they were fighting for (maybe too much like real life).

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[freeweed]

Attitudes like this are suspiciously like historians/archaeologists used to be (until very recently, anyway).

"Why should we care about the common man, we only want to record the *important* events".

You never know what's important data 50 or 100 years down the road.

Peculiar Use of the Word "Technology"

[John Hasler]

> Paper was itself a technology at one point,

And it stopped being a technology when?

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[jez9999]

Actually, I'd say most people nowadays with a computer *do* have exactly the equivalent of a printing press - a printer. The real problem is that there's a lot of stuff that just doesn't lend itself to being stored on paper, owing to sheer size and its not being text. Continually updated webpages are a good example of sheer size, sound and video are a good example of not being text.

the thought is good, but impractical

[my sig is bigger tha]

due to overload - people still only pay attention to the data on or by "important people". glut can (and usually does) work the same as censorship...

Having it both ways

[Gorimek]

So paper is better because

1. It is easier to store data on, and
2. It is harder to store data on

I suspect some people just like paper, and make up reasons as they go along...

One way to use the higher storage capacity of digital storage would be to store stuff in thousands of different places, different media, formats etc. Some may be lost, become unreadable etc, but hardly every single copy. And it would still just take 1/1000 of the space of paper copies.

Re:Having it both ways

[Mac Degger]

The simple reason paper is better than anything else is that you can write in the margins.

And this is from someone who gleefully reads from his palmpilot in trams, trains, queues and bed, and has been doing so for a couple of years now.

And paper doesn't break so easily, and can be read anywhere (like in the sun on the beach).

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[gnu-generation-one]

"Paper is better than electronic for long term storage"

And carved stone is even better. I would suggest using a CNC milling machine to backup any data you want to keep for longer than paper allows, but I guess punchcards are probably just as good.

Could be worse I suppose. We could have translated the Rosetta stone to discover it reads: "Content-type: text/DRM-Encrypted\n Note: this material is copyrighted, please purchase an egyptian slave to allow you to legally read it"

Stunning

[Anonymous Coward]

the most stunningly successful civilization...

measured how, dude? by the size of your suv? by the number of hours you work each day? by the number of your children? by the amount of suffering on the planet?

you like science, so provide a scientific basis for this statement.

what the fuck does a "successful civilization" mean? all civilizations go up and come down. all we're doing is heading faster than every towards the point of disaster.

oh, you're going to tell me "this time it's different, humanity has all the answers, and we're never going to crash?" that's a bucket of shit, and you know it.

_my_ definition of success would be finding a balance in which we don't kill our host planet. we're like a fucking virus, dude, and your precious "success" is just the grand finale before the patient falls over.

humanity is a crap concept, dude, we're just genes that think we're important. that's the lesson you need to learn. it's not just our planet that's insignificant, its our species, its you and me.

know that, and you can find enlightenment.

there is no "success". only freedom from suffering.

Re:Stunning

[RayBender]

measured how, dude?

In modern society the average person can expect to live a longer, healthier life than in any other time or place. You can enjoy more travel, better food, a wider variety of entertainment, more access to information, access to a wider range of cultures and places, more of a political say in your future, etc. etc. If you are a woman you can for the first time in history choose how/if/when to bear children, meaning your life and worth isn't merely as a walking womb. That's pretty unique.

You spout off about our impending doom, but you should realize that modern society is the only society equipped to even begin to avoid this potential disaster. Other cultures have certainly caused (localized) environmental disasters (Australian aborigines destoying megafauna on their continent, Greeks deforesting their lands, the Easter Islanders, the extinction of the wooly mammoth). At least we see some of the consequences of our actions and are equipped to avoid them.

I'm not saying western civilization is perfect - by no means. But I am saying that by any objective measure western civilization - whether or not the fruit of the Latin alphabet - is pretty successful.

Re:Stunning

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, dude, but are we _happier_?

Re:Stunning

[RayBender]

Yes. It's easier to be happy when you're not dead.

Some years ago

[value_added]

I disconnected my telephone answering machine and removed the call-waiting feature. My rationale (at least what I told friends, family and co-workers) was that if I was home, I'd be happy to take their call. If I wasn't, there was no point calling me as I wasn't available to take their call. Over time, the complaints subsided (along with most of the telephone calls) and I resigned myself to a happy, albeit "quaint" and "old-fashioned" lifestyle. My life at that time was such that it afforded me this luxuriously relaxed approach to the outside world with few adverse effects -- picture Sean Connery (without the brogue) in "Finding Forrester" and you've got the idea. There were, however, certain individuals and family members who could neither comprehend nor accept my new "selfishness," and while their comments did prick my conscience from time to time, I refused to consider abandoning my new stance.

Now to be honest, I did find myself scratching my head on occasion trying to fashion a novel come-back to counter such objections, or provide an analogy by way of example but came up with little. Several months passed and I sat down one evening to read the new issue of Harper's Magazine and came across an article on Umberto Eco. I don't remember much about the article, except that it was well written, interesting, and concerned itself with (what else?) Umberto Eco. What I do remember, however, was the way in which Mr. Eco characterised himself as having no use for email and expressing a strong dislike of telephones. He advised anyone who was inclined to contact him to send a hand written note or letter addressed simply c/o the University of Bologna, the idea being that "it would eventually find its way" to him in due time.

Reading his words made me laugh (the funniest jokes are always the most personal, it seems) and I realized that even if I didn't live in southern Italy, my refusal to use an answering machine was perfectly justified. If Umberto Eco didn't answer his telephone, I didn't need to either. It was everyone else that had the problem. And if someone really really needed to contact me, they could similarly write a letter.

Things change for all of us, it seems.

--
value_added
e-mail, cell, pager and ICQ numbers available on request

Each to it's own

[Stephen Samuel]

Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's.
-- Jesus

There are advantages to both the web and physical books. The web is easy to search, but -- as a recent article pointed out -- it's very ephemeral. Web pages have an average lifespan of 100 days, and the WhiteHouse is limiting searches of articles about Iraq. Modulo problems like that, it's possible to find anything you want -- as long as there's stil a valid pointer to it, and it hasn't been changed.

Many years ago, I was doing a school report on Fidel Castro's revolutionary activities. My mother had an encyclopedia that had been bought in 1959 -- Just about the time that Castro was starting his second (and successful) revolution. The Encyclopedia Brittanica had about one paragraph on him -- describing him as little more than a failed revolutionary.

For me, this historical view of Castro (the view itself being of historical nature) was rather interesting... and unlikely to have been repeated in later versions of the encyclopedia. Today, even the teaser for the Fidel Castro's entry in the encyclopedia is as long as the entire original

. I'm very glad that my mother bought the original Encyclopedia, and that my sister has seen fit to keep it. I would also encourag anybody who has such old works to keep them as historical record, much less likely to change than the 'net.

For Umberto's third record form -- organic memory -- I live in BC, which still has a reasonably active Native culture. There are still a small handful of people in BC who grew up trained almost exclusively in the pre-european style of the various nations that are now British Columbia. The Native tradition is very much an oral one, and they had methods and customs designed to keep such histories constant over time... Present day researchers were surprised to find that centuries after first contact in the far north, the native oral histories of the episodes were pretty much in agreement with the written logs of the explorers of that time.

I remember one native elder recalling how his (then) elder scoffed at the european tradition of writing everything down...

"If it's that important, why do they have to write it down to remember it?"

Re:Each to it's own

[orthogonal]

For Umberto's third record form -- organic memory -- I live in BC

Yeah, yeah, most people in BC had to rely on organic memory -- papyrus and vellum were for the rich only.

Stop living in the past, Homer!

Re:Each to it's own

[Anonymous Coward]

When I was a Linguistics undergrad, one prof was doing research with an elder who spoke one of the moribund Salish languages (Lushootseed, I think). When my prof asked him a question that had been asked before, he could remember not only that it had been asked, but also which day it had been asked. Hell, he probably remembered what they were both wearing at the time. That's the difference between an oral culture and ours: since we write everything down, we don't remember anything for ourselves.

Re:Each to it's own

[Mac Degger]

Thanks...I'll remember that one.

And I'm not being sarcastic.

Re:Each to it's own

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, BC has great organic stuff, but it's not so good for short term memory...

Re:Each to it's own

[Grab]

But today, you may have a new version of Encarta each year. Job done, and it'll only take 1 foot of bookshelf space for the CDs! I don't see why the web is referred to as the standard for information, when the web is just the front end into a zillion version-controlled databases of articles, all archived to way back when. Archiving data onto CD or onto hard drive combines the best of both worlds - information stored forever in a convenient format.

(OK, CDs die over time. But archiving in a RAID disk system would be robust to failure of drives, and would allow any upgrades for as long into the future as you want. And if RAID ever becomes obsolete, you can simply transfer the data to your next robust backup system, since it's all in a convenient format already.)

Grab.

Re:Each to it's own

[Stephen Samuel]

But archiving in a RAID disk system would be robust to failure of drives,

That's just fine, until Microsoft brings out LongHorn and prevents you from making backup copies of anything -- or prevents you fram accessing that data after you upgrade your machine, etc.

Re:Each to it's own

[michael_cain]

The web is easy to search, but -- as a recent article pointed out -- it's very ephemeral. Web pages have an average lifespan of 100 days

As a part-time academic, one of the other problems with the Web is the lack of "pedigree" for much of the information that one finds there. When you find a page containing what you believe to be useful information, sometimes in its original location and sometimes in an archive, you are often faced with unanswerable questions about it: who wrote this, when did they write it, has it been modified since then? Books and paper journals generally make the pedigree quite obvious, and are much harder to modify (which can sometimes be a good thing).

Present day researchers were surprised to find that centuries after first contact in the far north, the native oral histories of the episodes were pretty much in agreement with the written logs of the explorers of that time.

Cool! But... now let's see them do it with scientific and engineering knowledge. Heck, most of the people that I know that work with mathematics can't even carry on a reasonable conversation without paper or a blackboard.

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[Artifakt]

Sounds interesting. Did he buy a single copy of a rare and important newspaper, or does he now own a whole press corporation?

(And how do the woodchucks figure into this?)

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[The Limp Devil]

And I have trouble reading a file transcribed in 1990 (Texto database formatted for PCWrite). However, the 400 year old original is perfectly readable.

Think "source code"

[Bananenrepublik]

Just think he's talking about source code and distributed authorship like in most GPL'ed projects, and you'll see his point.

Re:RTFA?

[Araneas]

I was taking at bit of a poke at the RTFM camp. Basically the parent was saying "I can't understand it so I can't see the value", much the same reaction I see when non-technical people try to comprehend man pages. Both valid positions by the way.

At least two of us understood the background Eco was drawing. I honestly don't expect a large segment of Slashdot readers have spent time with Derida, Foucault, Saussure et. al.

The problem with Eco is that he can get very byzantine at times. For me it is the sheer pleasure of his byzantine plots that make him so enjoyable. For others - not so much.

You can also trash paper accidentally

[Anonymous Coward]

I tend to trash paper, because paper, unlike electronic information, IS HEAVY.

Repeatedly I trashed important paper documents by accident. For this reason I always digitize important paper documents, they are easy to retrieve AND HAVE NO WEIGHT I never trash emails, not even spam (just sort it) I make two identical backup copies every week.

The day after the night before

[unborn]

From the article:

"Books are still the best companions for a shipwreck, or for the day after the night before."

Does this mean: "The day the shipwreck occured"?

Not An Entirely Bad Thing To Lose

[bettiwettiwoo]

But how many priceless documents have been lost over the millenia? Some of da Vinci's works may be lost to time.

Yes, but not everything that has been lost over the past thousands years has been masterpieces: most of it was probably crap.

I once saw an interview with a historian who said something along the lines that the task facing historians today and the task facing historians of tomorrow were completely different: those of today are faced with the problem of scarcity of documentation (is there any documentation at all relating to what you're researching, can it be found, is that which exists representative, is it true, etc); whereas the latter, due to our present obsession with preserving absolutely everything, will be faced with the enormous task of trying to find and trying to find out how to find anything relevant and worthwhile in reams (used loosely) and reams of data.

It is obviously impossible to say how many masterpieces of whatever that has been lost. However, surprisingly many has survived. If the Greeks had thought the Iliad a boring piece of soap opera, it probably wouldn't had survived. It is true that some have not perhaps been entirely appreciated within their own culture and have been preserved thanks to other ones: e.g., we know Shakespeare's play as they were originally written largely thanks to German scholars; Aristotle's work is known thanks to preservation by the Arab/Muslim society. It is of course quite possible that there were other oeuvres, contemporary to these or not, of equal quality and importance which are lost to us now due to under-appreciation, but somehow I doubt it.

Even at the risk of losing a masterpiece or two, would our present compulsive preservation of every last skerrick of just about everything necessarily be bad thing to lose?

Re:Not An Entirely Bad Thing To Lose

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahh a valid point
We could call this an evolution of ideas
The fittest survive
Using this we could say astrology is quite fit, being old and still in use today
Or did you want to restrict yourself to realestate type questions (Im bored with that Michangelo, lets pop down to Walmart and look for a new poster)
In which case we would have the plate tectonic theory of socialevolution.
Every society known has regarded the planet Mars as being related to war, but of course astrology is unscientific poppycock, I know becuase scientest have told me that, meantime astroligers continue to ascert its validity, despite the scietific evidence!

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[Greedo]

The core of the book recounts Baker's attempt, in 1999, to persuade the British Library not to junk more than 2,000 bound volumes of American newspapers - the last remaining copies in the world - including a complete run of the Chicago Tribune from 1888 to 1958 and hundreds of editions of Joseph Pulitzer's ground-breaking colour broadsheet of the 1890s, the New York World. ...

But the library said it needed the space, and, since it is not legally bound to retain hard copies of non-British publications, it ignored him. Undeterred, he joined the birthday-newspaper dealers at an auction for the discarded papers, and spent $26,000 (18,200) of his retirement money on runs of the Tribune and the World. Now they are stored in Baker's American Newspaper Repository - a converted mill in the isolated New Hampshire town of Rollinsford that he shares with the Humpty Dumpty Potato Chips company.

And the chipmunks are just their for the aesthetic. :)

Amazing

[3riol]

Your gall impresses me, to the extent that I doubt whether you are really serious in posting this.
In what way are abstract mathematics, music, or astronomy the sole creation of western civilisation? What justifies your ridiculous "The adored Chinese worldview" ? No one here has suggested anything as idiotic as an absolute classification of superiority between civilisations (an extremely vague term, by the way).
The current situation in China which you cite as an example of the failure of its "worldview" (please define) has more to do with the universal weaknesses of Men before power and the madness of leaders than to the Chinese culture's imaginary lack of abstraction.
Anyone who has in the least studied the Chinese writing system knows that its capacity for abstraction is indeed impressive, which leads to its designation as ideograms and never pictograms (though neither are accurate). This is a system that has been used to write works of extroardinary philosophical value with success, and that has not hindered its users in having had for some time the most culturally and artistically productive culture in the world (while us Europeans were playing with spears in the mud), or the invention of paper, gunpowder, refined medicine...
I would dare say that actually, some of the "advancement" of Western culture might be attributable to its very recklessness in the face of the rest of the World.
I personally think it indisputable that it is a positive concept to posess a cultural bias that does not place Mankind at the very center of things. As for your "Middle Kingdom" quip, I would hazard that the greater part of your post above is itself rather arrogant and self-centered ("in your book" is what matters, right?), and puts you in rather a delicate position to admonish a name which comes from an ancient cultural and geographic situation which has been shared by all cultures (The Odyssey, for example, took on the task of ordering the world outside Ancient Greece, based on its differences from the norm, being the home culture of its author).
This is all however laughable when compared to the arresting courage and/or total lack of thought which doubtless let you describe Chinese culture (and all non-Western ones?) as "primitive". We are all impressed.

Naked emperor

[ishmaelflood]

Eco may be a great thinker, but he is usually a lousy communicator.

He either constructs sentences of great sounding phrases that mean little, or hits the reader with a barrage of multisyllabillic jargon.

George Orwell would not, I think, rate Eco's article very highly.

Re:Naked emperor

[ynohoo]

Well his first language is Italian, not English. He has also spent alot of his life studying medieval documents and history, so it is unlikely he would come across like Orwell, who spent most of his life producing novel in 20th century English.

I have always enjoyed his work, although sometimes you have read it twice to get his meaning (which it not unusual for translations).

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[Mac Degger]

Have an earthquake...what survives....your server or the books in a library?

Yeah, I know, water'll kill both, but you get the point; paper is more difficult to kill than anything stored electronically. And, yeah, you can set fire to paper...but see what data you fiund on a burned HD :)

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[Mac Degger]

Nice try, no cigar (unfortunately); printing ink (even/especially laserprinter toner) is rather volatile...it does not last...have a look at something you printed out in 1985 (on your dotmatrix printer)...hell, have a look at something you printed out just a couple of years back.

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[jerde]

What kind of plaintext: ASCII or Unicode?

Hey, what about EBCDIC? :)

- Peter

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[the eric conspiracy]

You didn't answer the question about the Library of Alexandria.

And what question was that? A burning? At best that story is now regarded as somewhat dubious. More likely it was political forces that led to the loss of the data held therein, and perhaps just the entropy of time. Do we think that digital media would have faired better over 2000 years? I highly doubt it.

Data on paper is just as easily lost.

In what meaning of the word 'lost'. Sure, we can lose data on paper due to mistreatment, but well treated data on paper is proven to have durability in the range of millenia. No digital medium can claim that kind of durability.

Not to mention that it was blind luck that the Rosetta Stone survived and was found.

Nah. The Rosetta Stone was only one of several inscriptions that enabled translation of hieroglyphics. While it was the most important it was be no means sufficient on it's own, and there have been other discoveries since that would have led to translation of hieroglyphs even if the stone had never been found.

If you want something to survive for a long time, it seems to me that the best strategy is to make as many copies as possible, in as many formats as possible.

That is rather self-evident wouldn't you say? And certainly some of those formats should not be digital.

One of the most interesting efforts underway at the momemnt is to preserve some historical music, being done by the Library of Congress. Do you know how they are doing it? Not digital for sure. They are cutting analog LPs on shellac disks. They don't have anything else that they think will last more than 100 years.

http://www.npr.org/display_pages/features/featur e_ 1216161.html

Did Eco think about the purpose of a Library?

[G4from128k]

There is much irony in advocating the use of paper at the grand opening on the new Bibliotheca Alexandrina. After all, we lost the first library at Alexandria due to the flammability and single-point vulnerability of paper-based libraries. I don't think that Eco thought too much about the real purpose of a library and how mineral memory serves that purpose better than does vegetal memory.

A library is intended to provide a robust safe-keeping storage function for human knowledge. The ever-decreasing cost of hard disks mean that more people can now maintain their own personal libraries. And if you use a fairly simple common denominator format and transfer/translate old documents, then you can maintain digital copies of works indefinitely. These personal libraries are distributed and that makes them much more robust to both calamity and government censorship. At the very least it is much easier to reconstruct a destroyed digital library than a destroyed paper library. Had the old library of Alexandria been on the web back then, we would still have it now.

A library also provides a selection/filtering process -- helping patrons to find what they are looking for in the literal stacks of library. Although a logical organization scheme (such as LC or Dewey), card catalogs (online or paper) and talented librarians can help people find what they are looking for, these schemes are terribly limited. If your chosen paper book is checked out, you are out of luck. If you seek obscure information, you are faced with a laborious process of trying to find books that might include a small mention of your topic. Even if you want a good piece of literature, you can have a hard time finding someone with "your taste" in literature to provide a recommendation. In contrast, digital libraries never run out of copies, have fine-grain search capabilities, and offer collaborative filtering options (like Amazon's people who bought X, also bought Y).

I can only hope that professional librarians are more forward thinking than Eco is.

Re: not enough paper

[jbanana]

> what about all the data that is lost forever because there is simply not enough paper to record it on
I have discovered a truly marvelous solution to this problem that this margin is too narrow to contain.

That's funny

[Anonymous Coward]

I installed an answering machine, with the speaker volume quite low, and turned off all the ringers on my phones.

And so my phone has essentially turned into email, except that I can pick up if I really want to.

It's reduced my stress level considerably.

More interestingly...

[Any Web Loco]

He wrote "Foucault's Pendulum", which although not as well known as Rose, is a superior book. Lots of interesting digressions on the nature of knowledge...

Re:More interestingly...

[Ignominious Cow Herd]

Superior? Maybe. Probably. But what was all that crap about *?

Re:More interestingly...

[lnovak]

IIRC, it was about getting lost in the abyss...

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[Anonymous Coward]

I keep my most important documents in cuneiform writing on a rais (redundant array of slates)! A slate per major geological era! I'm safe from cosmic particles, meteorites and those damn ever-approaching tectonic plates! If only I had something important to say!

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[Anonymous Coward]

Could be worse I suppose. We could have translated the Rosetta stone to discover it reads: "Content-type: text/DRM-Encrypted\n Note: this material is copyrighted, please purchase an egyptian slave to allow you to legally read it"

That would be no problem. We had just to wait some years until we find the public domain stone from which they ripped off the DRM'em version of the content.

A purist

[j_w_d]

would point out that paper is STILL a technological product. Material products are mostly technological, either in that they assist in achieving an end or are the product of such a process. Referring to electronics as "technology" is a bit of historical media semantic sloppiness that has emerged over the years as "high technology" became common place. Your hammer and wedge are basic technology and will remain so.

Re:A purist

[joabj]

Yup, you're right. "Paper was considered a technology" would be the better way to phrase that (Hey it was 1 am in the morning, cut me some slack!)

Anyway, technology (with the root of techni) means the application of science to some practical end.

The thing that irks me is when people say "technology" when all they are talking about is "information technology" (i.e. "Get all your technology news here!" gar!)

Re:A purist

[j_w_d]

The thing that irks me is when people say "technology" when all they are talking about is "information technology" (i.e. "Get all your technology news here!" gar!)

As you might guess, I absolutely agree with your feelings about this common use of "technology." Being an archaeologist, my primary form of data tends to be "technological," chips from making or using stone, charcoal from fires, worked materials of any sort. Anyway, no one really appreciates a purist.

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[darkewolf]

Your information about the LPs on Shellac disks here is quite interesting in itself. An LP, with a little effort and expected sound loss can be played manually. With a few hours of effort I can make a reasonably bad mechanical LP player. Don't even need eletricity to play it, just a lot of effort winding a lever. If the 'power went out' a CD is unreadable. There is no manual way to pull the sound or data from it and reproduce it.

Same goes with books. End of civilization (I have watched Mad Max far too many times I think) and books can still be read. A data CD will just be a way to have a mirror.

Of course, I may be biased. I adore printed books. I have ones that are over 150 years old in my collection. And I always print out my digital books when I can. Reading paper is so much nicer than spending more time staring at a screen.

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[Anonymous Coward]

UTF-8 is compatible with ASCII, what's your point? Even if it weren't, how long would it take to make a converter, it's not like ASCII is a complicated format...

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[pardonne]

Nice writeup, certainly more interesting than Umberto's ramblings. The bronze horse you linked to doesn't look very interesting though. Why the WOW?

Pardonne

wow.

[themusicgod1]

didn't Caesar mention the druids using the very same logic in his memoirs?

anyways what i was going to say, about the entire situation is that this should not be a PAPER vs COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY in reference to the environment, or WHATEVER, but that this should be viewed as 'how can we successfully integrate paper and technology together?'... ...but then you reminded me to add in the oral side of things...which needs to be mentioned. using our minds as storage, and as a communication media, to save strain on the environment. there's a concept

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[jez9999]

hell, have a look at something you printed out just a couple of years back.

*looks at schoolwork from a couple of years back*

Yep, it's in pretty much perfect condition, having been kept in a nice folder. Your point?

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[armb]

> > Paper is better than electronic for long term storage.

> That's arguably true provided you have a printing press ... most things written more than a thousand years ago don't exist today

And the electronic versions from more than a thousand years ago have lasted better? I think you can assume that if electronic storage is an option, then printing technology is available.

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[mikerich]

The bronze horse you linked to doesn't look very interesting though. Why the WOW?

It's huge and very beautiful! The one at San Siro in Milan stands on a 1.5 metre high marble plinth, so your head is just about level with the horse's hooves, above that you have this enormous animal giving the impression that it is bearing down on you (which is just what the Sforza family would have intended it to do).

But it is also been given an extremely animate pose - the horse is trotting, twisting its head, eyes rolling, nostrils flared. Leonardo broke with centuries of tradition in doing this - horses had always been depicted with heads straight ahead and without character.

Clearly Leonardo loved horses, he sketched thousands of them, dissected them - the musculature on his horse is far more accurate than those of his contemporaries and he went on to write the first accurate book on equine medicine!

Take a look at the picture of it being assembled by crane to get some idea of its size. In some ways the modern statue is less ambitious than Leonardo's. He wanted the statue to be self-supporting without an internal skeleton (known as the armature).

To do this, Leonardo intended to create his statue in a single pouring of bronze (about 80 tonnes of molten metal). This had never been attempted before (or since) and so he had to develop a completely new casting technique, very similar to the way we now make injection moulded plastics.

Leonardo sketched the process for casting his statue and clearly worked out how to do it, but we now think that he couldn't have got a good cast. Hence the recreation used conventional bronze casting technologies.

Obligatory self promotion approaching. If you're in the UK, you can learn more about the Sforza Horse in the Open University course A178 - Perspectives on Leonardo da Vinci .

And of course, when you're in Milan, drop by the statue itself!

Best wishes,
Mike.

Eco on /.

[gummint]

Thus you will see how from a silly question many wise answers can be produced, and such is probably the cultural function of naive interviews.

Clearly this man has been reading /.

Eco=old nut

[Dun Malg]

I find it hard to take Umberto Eco seriously anymore. Eco, while a skilled writer, seems to get caught in the mental-masturbation trap of "philosophy as a hard science". What did ME in was this choice quote:

"the media have multiplied, but some of them act as media of media, or in other words, media squared" (The Multiplication of the Media)

Problem is, he bandies about mathematical terms as if they're meaningful in a non-mathematical context. The "media squared" crap is particularly illuminating because he speaks as though "media" has some obvious value greater than one, and multiplying it times itself causes some calculable exponential growth. I once had an Eco-head try to tell me it was a clearly reasoned analysis, until I posited that perhaps media has a value of less than one (as it only tells half the story, ha ha!) and subsequently gets SMALLER every time it gets squared. He said I "just don't get it", but couldn't tell me why I was wrong. Philosophers always annoy me.

ITYM "doomsday".

[Anonymous Coward]

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[pardonne]

Thanks for the links. The assembly picture really
puts it in perspective. I now agree with the wow :)

> And of course, when you're in Milan, drop by the statue itself!

Most definitely will.
Thank you for the info.

Pardonne

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[mikerich]

I've put my photos (taken at midday on a blinding Italian summer's day) up at:

http://homepage.mac.com/mike_richards/PhotoAlbum4. html

The first one should give you some idea of how big the horse is - yes those are people alongside!

Best wishes,
Mike.

Re:Paper Electronics (for many things anyhow)

[SteelRat]

..and when you say DRM, I suppose we'll just assume that you really intended to say CM (content management).

It should be more about maintaining the integrity of the information and less about licensing for the purposes of this discussion.

I'd view them as two distinct and separate issues; data integrity and access to the data. You don't need a library card to open the cover of a book, but you may to remove it from the library.

Honest future: Clay tablets

[bathdt]

One advantage of readily-accessible hard copy of data is that it holds a future Ministry of Truth into account. In a paranoid mood, I could imagine electronically archived morbidy/mortality data to be edited to make false assertions about improvements in the quality of life. Of course, if you want REAL permanence in records that are not monuments with inscriptions, go back to the clay tablets of Sumeria: every fire bakes them even harder! (Mind you, they don't survive cruise missiles that well). I wonder if we can get these new-fangled 3D printers to use dirt and water and spool straight to a kiln. ;-)

Interesting essay...

[HTH NE1]

"No web site is configured at this address."

I hope he retained a copy on paper, because it seems the electronic memory of it has gone blank.