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QR Codes For Memorials
mikejuk writes "Companies in America, Denmark and the UK are adding QR codes to gravestones that can be used to view online memorials via smartphones. The idea is that these living headstones can include photographs, videos and memories of the dead person from family and friends. Genealogists and historians have always found graveyards a useful resource. If the QR idea takes hold memorials will be able to tell much more to future generations."
If the QR idea takes hold memorials will be able to tell much more to future generations
Yes, put obsolete technology there. Why not just put floppies?
You don't need QR codes for that information anymore. Everything is saved anyway. You could just put the persons social security number there and all that information and much more would still be available.
If the QR idea takes hold memorials will be able to tell much more to future generations
Or not, if these companies go out of business, which is extremely likely to happen in the next few decades or centuries.
If you want to add additional data, encode it somehow and engrave it on the stone itself. And put an additional tablet in each graveyard explaining the encoding.
If the QR idea takes hold memorials will be able to tell much more to future generations.
Uh huh. How many future generations? For how long are QR codes going to be a popular format, and for how long are these companies going to be around?
Looks like I chose the wrong week to try and avoid stupidity.
This is the stupidest idea I've heard since Friday. I must be reading Slashdot again.
Thus, behold, all that will be on my tombstone
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Wrong. QR codes can store over 2KB of arbitrary binary data.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
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This website www . eternalmemories . com is available. (C) 2015 Godaddy.com
Nothing is so impermanent as an online web service.
On the Plus side, it'll save space in crowded cemeteries, as they won't need so much space to list the Dearly Departed. Particularly, in mausoleums, and content can be changed and updated as needed without costly stone replacements.
The bad news is, a memorial wall of nondescript QR codes will mean the non-technologically equipped will see nothing more than a bewildering array of QRs, and can't pinpoint their loved ones name.
Even worse: the dearly departed can have their web-ghost hacked by the unscrupulous, and serve up viruses and/or mal-ware, or simply bombard the grieving family member(s) with "inappropriate content" such as Ads (both commercial and less-than friendly)
Scanning a Memorial Wall could result in a cacophony of Ads in poor taste, Vogon-grade poetry, and sex scenes drowning out the messages of the departed.
And THEN, there will be Lawsuits!
Thanks to the error correction algorithms and necessarily-lenient recognition, QR codes can be colorful, stylized, and smoothly integrated into most graphic designs.
Of course, the disconnect between nerds who know this and the artists who make the signs means we'll be stuck with ugly QR codes for a while.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
So why not just put the whole information IN the gravestone itself as a bunch of base64-encoded images? ...or just plain text?. There are some QR formats that allow such things, no need to host the damn thing on the interwebs anyway. Anything you'd want in 1264 characters or less (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_code#Design)
In any case, I see this as a very short-lived experiment. Why don't they just carve a portrait of the person and a short bio on the back of the stone and let *them* figure it out after N-generations? I mean, besides time and costs...oh, and skill...or maybe that robotic arm that carves people up...in the stones I mean.
Have some friggin' common sense FFS.
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A poster with a QR code ruins the look?
White people problems.
Might as well slap an RFID tag on while you're at it. Or an E-Ink display (solar powered, natch).
Seriously. Who's wandering around cemeteries going "Gee, if I only had detailed biographical information on this random dead dude?" I thought the accepted practice was to visit dead people you knew about.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
I mean, just check this out! Updated daily!
http://picturesofpeoplescanningqrcodes.tumblr.com/
They are absolute wastes of land. You have acres of land tied up around here for 100+ year old graves that absolutely no one ever visits.
Grave sites are only for the living who just lost someone, which I understand. But, how often are they visited by those who have had someone pass?
I don't think the version 40 QR code is going to be feasible in granite. The version 4 seems the most likely to survive and it's only 50 characters.
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http://www.laurencemartin.org/codeblock2.png if you find a good decoder this proves you wrong in the most brutal way possible.
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[citation needed]
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Printed on the back side of the stone as a 6" square, the version 40 code has large enough pixels that a deep engraving could survive a century or two.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Future/Alien Archeologists are going to have a field day trying to decipher those.
QR codes are extremely unlikely to persist any longer than ten years. If you've programmed a point-of-sale system like me you probably know that there are more coding schemes for barcodes than you can shake a stick at. QR codes are just the current encoding fad that will soon be replaced by something better.
There are plenty of people with their faces poorly encoded into QR codes. I've seen many on people's avatars. There's even a website that does this for you. I couldn't get mine to be recognisable though :(
I've also seen the BBC characters visible on a QR code, so it can be done.
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After I'm gone you want to place a QR code on my gravestone?
Over my dead body.
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A referral to an online service is pretty stupid for a long-term idea. Nobody will care in 100 years.
What IS neat is QR codes can store information directly, in a standard format, that can be manually decoded BY HAND if you have to. This is useful for "the long haul". Most people are not aware there are different sizes of QR codes, and the standard encoding can hold a kilobyte or so of information.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_code
Etching the QR code on the stone is not ideal. If I wanted it to last very long time, I'd look at using a gold or platinum protective film (perferably coated as to not look valuable) with the QR code lithographically etched onto an aluminum plate, or something along those lines.
A more interesting idea would be the design of a long-life semiconductor that could flash out a message in morse code. I think it'd be feasible to design something that would remain functional for 100 years or more with current technology. Maybe more with descretes, and if you didn't want to have an onboard power source like a small solar cell / gold ultracapacitor.
For really long term, it has to be decodable by hand or with the information on the device.
Mortality is a bitch.
..don't panic
This won't come for free. There are many parties involved in a funeral, they're all businesses to some extent or another, and they all have they're hand out, looking to meet their revenue needs. Since TFA talks about QR codes on headstones, this sounds localized to the cemetery/mausoleum. They have physical control, so they would be the managing party, even if they contracted the job out.
So the costs of this idea are a web server setup, possibly wireless access, etc. I would guess that they would be run on a "trust fund" kind of basis. Pay a fee at internment, and the interest pays for ongoing maintenance. I would imagine that pay-by-year would last until someone had a tight year, the a few years later someone else would ask/pay to resume service, hope the data still existed, and all of that other messy stuff.
Next complication, assuming it's contracted out, would the cemetery/mausoleum management insist on owning the data, even as they're contracting out pretty much the entire project? Otherwise, what happens to the data when either the IT contractor goes under, the relationship goes sour, or whatever?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
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Oh, that crazy uncle Henry! Still showing off after all this time.
Have gnu, will travel.
A QR code can hold less than 3 kilobytes. You might be able to squeeze a few pages of text, but anything more data-intensive than that, you'll have to put in a URL or some such that points to it. And how long will that be good?
a QR code is nice, but I have seen many headstones with faded/eroded text, and some were only a 150 years old. For how long is the engraved granite or etched metal going to be readable?
Most marketing uses of QR codes use "level L" or "level M" error correction. Codes using these ECC levels can be read with 93% or 85% of the symbol intact respectively. But QR can also be configured with "level Q", such that the message can be reconstructed from 75% of the symbol. This results in a larger symbol (and thus smaller squares).
Should this info also be buried with the body, or just under the headstone?
Both. Engrave another copy of the symbol and bury it with the body.
Elsewhere, another historian will find a specification for a QR code reader, and eventually a third historian will find both in some archives and make the connection
And to make this even easier, engrave a copy of this spec to store in each cemetery where this system is used.
Why does everybody go with the marketing hype of QR? Datamatrix is far superior, has better redundancy and holds much more data in the same space. You could even put the entire content into the Datamatrix as plain text, rather than just an URL to deadwebsite.com. Or better yet, burn the image into a crystal surface optically covered by a very thick & transparent protective layer, that can be viewed optically by any macroscopic lens on any kids iPhone63 in the next decades.
My understanding is that while Data Matrix has better error correction for misread bits, it is not as resilient to damage as QR when it comes to missing chunks of the matrix. Its largest standard size also holds less than the largest QR code.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
http://www.memorymedallion.com/ (I bought one for my Mother In Law's headstone) puts a portion of the monies into an escrow account to keep the servers running. I'm happy with the service and customer support.
chemically litho etched nickel plate will last longer than the ceramic tile. To affix it use either stainless or nickel lag screws.
Bonus points if you can have it covered in glass by a glassblower to protect the nickel, that should give you a couple decades (or one vandal) before the nickel is exposed.
-nb
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A six-inch version 40 code has pixels slightly less than a millimeter on a side. If you carve the code deep enough to survive a century of erosion, isolated raised pixels are likely to break off either during the carving process or with the first freeze/thaw cycle.
To survive a century, you really want the minimum feature size to be at least five millimeters, which works out to a version 40 code that's three feet across.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.