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Century Old Antarctic Expedition Notebook Found Underneath Ice
An anonymous reader writes During his second expedition to Antarctica, British explorer Robert Scott—and most of his team—died from overexposure to the elements. Over 100 years after their deaths, an artifact from his journey has surfaced. New Zealand's Antarctic Heritage Trust reports that they have found a notebook which tracked Scott's last Terra Nova Expedition. According to the Antarctic Heritage Trust, the notebook belonged to a surgeon, photographer and zoologist named George Murray Levick, who accompanied Scott at the unfortunate Terra Nova expedition. Executive Director Nigel Watson said, "It's an exciting find. The notebook is a missing part of the official expedition record. After spending seven years conserving Scott's last expedition building and collection, we are delighted to still be finding new artifacts."
It doesn't even have an ethernet port.
At least the notebook's logs weren't written in a cryptic binary format like systemd's logs. Because they're in plain text, we can still easily understand them over a century later.
Inquiring minds want to know
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
In Britain he is generally known as "Captain Scott" or "Scott of the errr is it the Artic or the other one?"
We deify people who try really hard but come second and Scott is no exception being beaten to the South Pole by the Norwegian Amundsen, but he cheated by knowing more about the environment and being properly equipped.
At least the notebook's logs weren't written in a cryptic binary format like systemd's logs. Because they're in plain text, we can still easily understand them over a century later.
While I laughed at the joke, this is actually a serious problem.
If you don't explicitly transfer electronic data from one generation of media/format to the next then it becomes so much harder to recover it with each technical generation that you skip. Which means that in the future when people digital media hidden away in some shoebox that belonged to their great-grandpa, they are more likely to throw it away than to try and figure out what it is.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Let this be a warning to all you Etruscans out there. Oh, wait...too late.
Ezekiel 23:20
find .. when people find digital media
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
March 18th 1912: We got Pete for dinner.
March 19th 1912: We got Pete again for dinner. He was a little bit more frozen than yesterday.
March 20th 1912: Pete is good, but now it is three days in a row and I am starting to think Tom could be a valuable replacement and upgrade to our diet.
Achille Talon
Hop!
Since historians work with whatever data is most prevalent, they would conclude this era was full of nerds who were pissed off when someone talks about optimizing the queues for ice in desert.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"During his second expedition to Antarctica, British explorer Robert Scott—and most of his team—died from overexposure to the elements."
"Most of his team"?
Actually ALL of the polar party - Scott, Oates, Bowers, Wilson, PO Evans - died, but this was far from the majoirity of the team that went to the Antarctic.
And they almst certain died of scurvy, not exposure.
Good try.
...is a clue that leads to the FreeMason treasure! (Hint, it's behind Mt. Rushmore. ;^)
Ken
Oh stfu kid, systemd is not that bad. Yes, it goes against a deeply rooted ideology of doing one thing and doing it right, but it also bridges a lot of things together (thus breaking the boundaries between many distros) which most of you ignorant fucks fail to recognize.
Out with the old, in with the new and if you can't deal with it, then die!
was a pretty cool read.
The British fondly revere those who can maintain a stiff upper lip under trying circumstances.
Captain Scott's upper lip was decidedly stiff at the end of his expedition, as was his lower lip and the rest of him for that matter.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
I hear they're planning to change it to XML for easy reading and parsing, here's a preview of it:
I think the readability is much improved with the upcoming plaintext file format.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
whoops, wrong mod, sorry :(
At least the notebook's logs weren't written in a cryptic binary format like systemd's logs. Because they're in plain text, we can still easily understand them over a century later.
Language's themselves are abstract constructs. We still can't decipher many extinct languages and there is no way to be sure that in the future anyone will still have knowledge of English or any other human language currently in use
If nothing else they're going to hit the same brick wall that displays did when they stalled at 1080p ten years ago: Good Enough Syndrome...
1080p is far, FAR from good enough when you're talking about working on a monitor. Double or triple it and maybe give us more monitor space and we'll maybe agree that it's good enough.
harder? maybe.
maybe not.
you can play pretty much all, even very obscure, arcade games with information taken from them being ran in your modern computer. in the long term, things tend to work out for this stuff. once you can easily train some algos to run emulation of old sw and "manually" move over data you wont even be having trouble with spreadsheets, databases in crazy formats or any of that. I'd worry more about the short term readability and preservation.. like, currently I can't run most of programs I wrote for living only ten years ago on anything buyable from the shop today(as brand new items). which could have been said for the amiga circa 1996 I guess - now getting amiga stuff written in say 1990 in almost perfect quality on modern pc's is pretty easy.
(so, maybe someone writes a series60 emulator in the next 10 years - the so called emulator that was used for developing was actually a win32 shim.. so it was useless for developing, since it involved a different memory model and compilers, haha. there wer some rumors of some true real arm emulator research projects though.. ).
and i someone finds digital stuff from today 100 years from now, they might find it interesting. howerver if they find a memory card from today 5 years from now it's worthless, the same card 10 years from now is a curiosity, like the 32mb sd card I keep around, and the same card in 50 years is a rarity and in 100 years an artifact..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
An expedition to Antarctica that didn't end well, a notebook left behind. It's all too easy to make parallels with The Mountains of Madness.
And just in time for Halloween too.
Adds a whole new meaning to Blue Screen of Death, eh?
(Or was it a palm device like a Newton?)
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
Or like Windows NT's logs, ka-zing!
Ezekiel 23:20
Now I know the kind of porn you're into :)