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Vint Cerf Warns About the Perishability Of Human Knowledge (vice.com)
Vint Cerf "worries about the decreasing longevity of our media, and, thus, about our ability as a civilization to self-document -- to have a historical record that one day far in the future might be remarked upon and learned from." An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes Motherboard:
Magnetic films do not quite have the staying power as clay tablets. Clay tablets are more resilient than papyrus manuscripts are more resilient than parchment are more resilient than printed photographs are more resilient than digital photographs. At stake, according to Cerf, is "the possibility that the centuries well before ours will be better known than ours will be unless we are persistent about preserving digital content.
"The earlier media seem to have a kind of timeless longevity while modern media from the 1800s forward seem to have shrinking lifetimes. Just as the monks and Muslims of the Middle Ages preserved content by copying into new media, won't we need to do the same for our modern content...? Unless we face this challenge in a direct way, the truly impressive knowledge we have collectively produced in the past 100 years or so may simply evaporate with time."
He points out that much of this century's digital documents can't be viewed without software. Do we need to start carving our web pages into clay tablets?
"The earlier media seem to have a kind of timeless longevity while modern media from the 1800s forward seem to have shrinking lifetimes. Just as the monks and Muslims of the Middle Ages preserved content by copying into new media, won't we need to do the same for our modern content...? Unless we face this challenge in a direct way, the truly impressive knowledge we have collectively produced in the past 100 years or so may simply evaporate with time."
He points out that much of this century's digital documents can't be viewed without software. Do we need to start carving our web pages into clay tablets?
The vast majority of things that are worth knowing will always be remembered and preserved. If the few that forgotten become necessary, they will be reinvented.
The world will continue spinning. No need for alarm.
The best way to preserved knowledge is to disseminate it widely. Or, to paraphrase Linus Torvalds, someone somewhere will mirror all the really important stuff.
On the other hand, most of the clay tablets didn't preserve photographs or anything else other than something deemed "important". There is a lot of past that we cannot learn from clay tablets. The other issue is that not all clay tablets are readable at all! There are still clay tablets written in languages that we cannot translate, so this is similar to "digital documents can't be viewed without software". We simply cannot read them. So that's not a new problem. Therefore I don't agree with "The earlier media seem to have a kind of timeless longevity". Sure there's a bunch of squiggles carved into the clay but that doesn't help much if we cannot understand what the squiggles mean.
I agree that longevity issue is something that needs to be addressed somehow and I often thought about the same issue. Even with my personal data/information/photos I worry about longevity. It's a difficult problem.
That's why we have to support the Internet Archive library. Let's have a backup of everything there !! https://archive.org/
I've discussed this many times before. The loss is a much nearer term than thousands of years, too.
In the not so distant past, when Grandma passed on, the family went through and maintained all sorts of memorabilia. Pictures, letters, deeds, records/tapes/CDs, and other papers. Now, it's all digital. Facebook and possibly an external USB drive full of pictures that no one will ever know is there or find, music collections on laptops or iPods. All these things, and the records that they hold will wind up lost or in the trash and the information is lost forever.
Thanks to the digital age, the vast majority of people on this Earth will leave far less of a mark than the tiny feint scratches left by those before them. Sure, 'data live on forever' and records might exists somewhere, but data doesn't last unless someone is maintaining it and even then, it doesn;t mean that anyone will know the data is there or where to find it.
Just lock some smart people up in monasteries that only have their doors open every one year, ten years, hundred years and so on.
Vint Cerf "worries about the decreasing longevity of our media, and, thus, about our ability as a civilization to self-document -- to have a historical record that one day far in the future might be remarked upon and learned from."
I find it curious how often people forget how little of the knowledge of previous generations ever made it into written form. The vast majority of all human knowledge was never written down for most of human history and much of what was written has been long since lost. Today is no different. Furthermore people seem to forget that a tremendous amount of documents get printed so there are hard copy records of very substantial portions of the historical record. Thanks to modern printers FAR more than was ever available in previous generations and that will remain so. We should expect to lost substantial swaths of data over time. We're not going to be likely to be able to keep everything.
He points out that much of this century's digital documents can't be viewed without software.
Umm, I'd say 100% of digital documents cannot be viewed without software. If they could be viewed without software they wouldn't be digital documents.
Why don't you get off the internet then, since you are using the fruits of his work and advice....
(lightbulb) Now I see why one "surfs" the Internet!
It seems that there is an inverse proportionality between the durability of a storage medium and its storage density, and I don't know if we can overcome that easily, as we have the law of entropy working against us. A stone carving or a clay tablet can overcome hundreds and thousands of quantum events, and they will still be stone and clay. A papyrus starts to rot, when its molecules break up, and it gets brittle and is more easily destroyed. Printed paper is thinner and has smaller letters than a hand written papyrus and thus even small damage can erase whole words or paragraphs. And with a hard disk or flash memory, even single quantum events can erase or flip a bit, and a two bit error is already unrecoverable, and any more damage loses large swats of the file.
. . . some very smart people ARE already working on this issue, and have been for a long time. See the Digital Preservation Network and Internet Archive for starters.
I tried printing a clay tablet on my old dot-matrix printer, but the print head just clogged up.
It is happening as we speak.
Mid-20th century newsreels--an important history of the time--are sitting on shelves in film canisters, quietly disintegrating.
There are people who would like to copy them forward onto durable media, but they can't because the newsreels are copyrighted, but the copyright holders either can't be located or aren't interested in preserving them.
They will be dust long before they enter the public domain.
What is interesting is in some ways we are moving towards (back to) a more oral tradition. As our machines get better and better at understanding us we will inevitably do more talking and listening than writing (just look at how people are starting to dictate their text messages). I recently had a conversation with someone who postulated that our ability to write would disappear entirely. I don't think so, certainly not in the next 200 years or so. Our ability (and need) to express ideas through writing and imagery is much too ingrained in our culture to die out quickly.
Ultimately Cerf may be right, but perhaps not for the reasons he thinks. We will certainly lose a historical record of civilization but it may be because we stop writing.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
You do realize that Shakespeare was long dead by 1800, right?
We had this exact problem at a former place of employment, i.e. we had contract requirements to provide access to original oil field data for the 25-year lifetime of the field, the problem was that most of this data was in the form of seismic data locked into a specific version of the exploration sw.
The solution we came up with depended on making a virtual machine image of everything needed to run the original application & data, including license files and user databases, and then freeze the system clock: This way we could restart that image at any point in the future and as far as the sw would know it was still 2005.
We would still need regular maintenance, to make sure that newer versions of the virtualization platform could still run the original image. In the worst case we expected to have to add an additional virtualization layer, i.e. so we could run the 2005 sw inside a 2015 virtual machine which would run inside a 2030 VM host.
This approach has of course been used to good effect in order to save classic games.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
Thanks Randall.
https://xkcd.com/1683/
I suspect he means 'specialized' software, ie. things being saved in file types that aren't well documented in how to be read.
A .txt document will be easy to reverse engineer if you get the hard drive to spin up, a Word document moderately harder but far from impossible, but a .rar archive for example? Good luck with that if the knowledge has been lost and no copies of WinRAR remain!
That said, however. People are saving all their documents and photos in the cloud, where massive companies fight tooth and nail to make sure no information gets lost ever. Unless the world faces complete nuclear destruction there WILL be a lot of documentation left to sift through.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
The issue isn't just that the media will decay, it's that the media is too cheap. There is no incentive to curate our documents, and we will end up with so many still in existence, no-one in future ages will have the inclination to wade through the rubbish.
When people had paper photographs, they soon accumulated boxes of albums, and by 1990, those holiday snaps from 1970 were kind of dusty and not worth keeping. So people chucked them out. But of course they looked through them first and kept a couple of photos, maybe even got those framed. All of which means that when they died in 2010, their kids had only maybe 100 photos to look through, and decide what was worth holding on to.
Now, our holiday snaps are uploaded to the cloud. They aren't a nuisance, and we never get rid of any. When we die, maybe our kids will be able to get a drive or an account key, or something, with 20,000 photos on. Do you really think they will do more than look at a few random ones, before adding them to their own 5,000 photos?
Same with our emails, our whatsapp messages, our blog posts.
The total amount of media from our age will still be significant - the sheer quantity produced ensures that much will remain. But what remains intact won't do so because of its significance to our age. We don't bury our most valuable items in the ground for safety, or lock them in huge chests, or keep them in safes.
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The amount of information that is being generated is growing at an ever faster rate. A lot of it is still printed or archived in other ways. In the end, there is probably still a lot more information being archived, even per capita, than there used to be. Furthermore, most of that "information" is likely meaningless outside its cultural, social, and technological context. The amount of "timeless" information, information that will still be useful in a thousand years, is likely fairly modest in size.
Perhaps the biggest advantage of clay tablet is there was no autostart videos on them.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
we switched to modern media not because it lasts longer. It's more reliable because it's more easily copied/produced. You never had the option to use stone tablets for current knowledge -- there's too much knowledge now.
I grew up with my mother suggesting something very interesting: in 1925, if archeologists had dug up a microchip, would they have known what it was? Or just thought it was junk, or a toy, and moved on?
If we want to "document" knowledge, in an ever-lasting way, it's the same game as it's always been: you can't do it with language at all. Sorry. Language doesn't survive. Cave wall drawings are meaningless. Hieroglyphics are useless without culture. Dialects, subtleties, and context are required to interpret language. "bread crumbs" means nothing without a house made of gingerbread.
So how do we "document" knowledge? That's easy: reference objects. For example, the knowledge of how to build a telescope is best "documented" by building a telescope specifically for future generations to study -- maybe bigger, maybe with more obvious design decisions, maybe with more understandable materials, maybe with easily disassembling parts.
Reference builds. I'll say it now. Distant generations learn from objects, not from documentation. We dig up old pottery, and understand what sorts of tools were used. We don't dig up blueprints for pots. Take a reference telescope, and study it for a week. You'll learn everything you need to know about how it works, how it's used, what it can do.
Objects.
Academics are, well, merely academic. We've lost the concept of learning from observation. Remember grade-9 science's how-to-read-a-fish? Most of my friends can't read their own dog.
Well, they developed coffee, something many slash-dotters rely on. They invented modern Cryptology during that time period, something many slash-dotters rely on.
They invented the "modern" windmill, something that has been adapted to provide power for the computer you use in modern days. They developed disinfectants and many medicinal advancements.
They invented the modern guitar that no doubt plays on your music station.
During that period of time they pretty much kept science and literature alive when much of the rest of the world was slowing down. It seems odd you post disparaging things about them for a time period in which they pretty much kicked-ass and kept the world moving forwards. In fact in the middle ages, whilst western Christians were persecuting each other and torturing each other for imagined religious offenses, Religious tolerance was practiced in a lot of Muslim controlled areas.
In those days when Christians were putting "heretics" in torture chambers, Muslims only charged extra taxes on those that didn't convert.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
I once did a stint working for govt, in the dept of Education. Interestingly, that department also had responsibility for libraries and archives.
We had an effort underway to in the 1990s to copy records form 8" disks to 3.5 inch floppies in order to ensure their viability. It was non-trivial to find a working 8" floppy, but fortunately most of the data was in flat text which made it easier then dealing with proprietary formats.
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
Well, I'm having a terrible time reading Shakespeare's "Love's Labour Won" and "Cardenio". All that's now known about these plays are the titles and that he wrote them. The rest is silence.
So we know they weren't good enough for people to copy them into the modern day.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Effectively everything after 1921 has some kind of copyright complication with it complicating access and long term archiving. Since corporations can own stuff that ownership can go on forever. Even the Happy Birthday song is owned and nobody puts it in film or video as a result. I'm happy that google is winning the court cases its fighting to get copyrighted material on line, but its sad that it takes one corporation to take on other corporations to win.
Yup, those peace loving Muslims that took over Syria, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia , Libya, parts of India in their early days before turning their attention to Europe later on. They viciously slaughtered people who resisted. You narrative is so historically inaccurate as to be laughable.
Even stone can wear over time. Might I suggest talking rings? Or perhaps "photonics"?
A .txt document will be easy to reverse engineer if you get the hard drive to spin up, a Word document moderately harder but far from impossible, but a .rar archive for example? Good luck with that if the knowledge has been lost and no copies of WinRAR remain!
Thing is though, say our society is long gone and a new one is up, to find those documents in the first place they would have to have found a computer and more than likely got it working so chances are they would have the software they need. Unless they figure out which bit is the hard drive and hook it up to whatever computers they may or may not have and copy it's contents bit by bit they would be hard pressed to even tell what data is from what files. Either that or they'll think we all spoke like old school modems,
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Even if WinRAR.exe was delivered with the file, then one would have to understand the format of an EXE program, and the Windows version it was written for. One could deliver a full Linux distro that will be able to output the image on the screen, but will future computer understand the x86 and VESA standard? Would they have to build an x86 machine, as well as a machine that can interpret VESA to whatever display tech they'll have?
Quite a stack of turtles...
Totally wrong. Everything we know about the greece is thanks to the muslims preserving it over the middle ages. In europe, the old greek philosophers and mathematicians were all considered heathens and therefore not worth the parchment their writings were written on.
The term "Algebra" comes from a book about mathematics written by a muslim: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Its sad how development continued, and europe had the period of enlightenment while the muslim world is pursuing wahabism and worse ideologies.
Syriac translations played a major role for the later reception into Arabic. These translators from Syriac were mostly Nestorian and Jacobite Christians, working in the two hundred years following the Abbasid period. The most important translator of this group was the Syriac-speaking Christian Hunayn Ibn Ishaq (809-873), known to the Latins as Joannitius.
But isn't that just a high-tech version of understanding ancient Sumerian?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Even if WinRAR.exe was delivered with the file, then one would have to understand the format of an EXE program, and the Windows version it was written for. One could deliver a full Linux distro that will be able to output the image on the screen, but will future computer understand the x86 and VESA standard? Would they have to build an x86 machine, as well as a machine that can interpret VESA to whatever display tech they'll have?
Quite a stack of turtles...
You're asking these questions as if we haven't been basking in the awesome reality of virtual machines for the last 20 years.
It's not especially hard today to preserve and emulate a 20-year old Windows environment and run it on today's technology. We can even emulate within browsers today, which also demonstrates our ability to preserve older environments within newer technology. It likely won't be a difficult challenge to emulate the environments we may need in the future.
will future computer understand the x86 and VESA standard?
The former can be handled by using MIPS (a patent-free RISC ISA) instead of patented, complex modern x86, and by including an in-own-words description of the entire MIPS architecture, along with enough of a Rosetta stone to document the human language in which MIPS is described. Video can be handled as if it were a dumb frame buffer, also described in-own-words.
And a few hundred years later Christians committed xenocide in the Americas, subjugated Africa, Indian Subcontinent, forced drugs on China.
People suck. The difference is though, Muslim nations allowed freedom of religion long before Western nations even knew what that meant. Sure, the West leads on that front now, and many Islamic nations are far from free or tolerant. However, in the time frame that you are attacking them, the middle ages, they WERE the most enlightened people on the planet.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Actual information...
It wasn't that simple. The lack of transmission of Greek originals in the West was due to lack of knowledge of Greek more than anything else. The Romans treated Greek sort of like we did Latin up until a few years ago - a vestige of a higher civilization worth learning and preserving. They admired the ancient Greeks and strove to emulate them in some ways. It was only the upper crust in Rome that knew and used Greek, though. When the Empire broke up during the 4th and 5th centuries in the West, this method of transmission dried up. Greek became relatively unknown in the West, while Latin soldiered on and eventually became the vulgar Romance languages we have today - French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, etc. Even English is composed of about 60% Latin roots.
Envision yourself as a medieval monk/scribe copying scrolls. You'll copy the ones you understand, right? So it was in reality. Moreover, there wasn't a significant difference between say a 7th century scribe and a 12th century scribe in terms of level of religiosity. If the knowledge was to be disdained because it was heathen, that would have happened regardless of the exact century, at least up until the Reformation in the 1600s.
But a funny thing happened when Pope Urban II pronounced a crusade to conquer Jerusalem in 1095. The crusaders brought along lay people, and the resultant states of Outremer started mining Muslim documents and passing knowledge back to Europe. The sack and conquest of Constantinople by Venice in 1204 brought even more Greek knowledge to light. In Constantinople, living knowledge of Greek could also be found. Lastly, the fall of the Byzantines in 1453 was accompanied by a migration of much of the remaining knowledge and people who understood Greek to the West. All of a sudden, Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, Thucydides and Herodotus became available piece by piece via Latin translation from the archives of the Byzantine Empire and the Muslims in Baghdad and Alexandria.
There were no mass protests against Greek knowledge, and there was *lots* of Latin literature that was translated by religious scribes in the Middle Ages that should not have happened, if what you say is true. Have you ever seen what Juvenal had to write, for instance?
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Intellectual exchanges like this^ need to be preserved that for posterity.
Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1683/
No sig today...
Maths... Science... Astronomy...
They retained, and expanded and improved upon the knowledge learned by the classical civilizations. In the middle ages they were an enlightened and advanced civilization compared to the people to their west. Obviously, all civilizations had their problems, theirs did too; but, the middle ages was their golden age.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
"Requires IE6 and Adobe Flash"
BWAHAHAAHHAHAA HA HA HA!
This age will be known as the "Stupid Era" because it will look like we achieved nothing.
The futarmen won't be entirely wrong on that point.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
That's why Elon Musk wants to go to Mars, to have enough surface space to enscribe Wikipedia on it. Slashdot is going to be scribed into the surface of Pluto, although the news will be a little old by the time it reaches that far.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
They have a point, but I'd say that 99.99% of what is digitally recorded is probably not worth saving. Most important things just need to be re-saved in a modern equivalent every so often. Trying to save it all in hardcopy is silly.
It's kind of like all the digital pictures and social media we all have. Are your great-great-great grand kids going to give even the tiniest of rat's asses about all your facebook posts, online rants, and pictures or your crappy art you did as a teen? A few dozen pictures of each family member is probably more than will ever be interesting to them, and that won't be more than to make fun of your hair and clothes.
A great deal of so called "knowledge" the article is worried about produced by academia will also be discard able as the government grant seeking garbage that it is. Most of the actual knowledge will still be in use and in hardcopy/or digital backup in a modern format someplace.
Can we just agree that people suck and should be avoided at all costs?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
This is the biggest problem. People want to upload everything to the cloud, but have no idea what the "cloud" really is. There are servers and storage media/devices even in the cloud. When it no longer serves the needs of the cloud provider, all of that data can and will just disappear. Even paid services close up shop sometimes. Users will be given a short window to get their data somewhere else, then it will all be gone. You have no guarantee your pictures/data will be there tomorrow with the free services offered currently.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
This is not a new idea. It sounds like Vin Cerf just read the 1961 Hugo Award winning "A Canticle for Leibowitz".
It hasn't worked for Algebra. You learn it when your young, never use it in your adult life ever, yet there it is to face the next college student. You would think that with all the people who forgot it, it would no longer exist. yet there it is........... There must be an algebraic expression for that. If I could only remember it.
Well, according to yourself, they preserved technical documents. But then again, since when has logic mattered to bigots?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Paper books have all kinds of 'staying power', can withstand all kinds of damage and still be readable, and are a 'mature technology' that even the lowliest of nations can manage to produce. I recommend using more of them. ;-)
Relative to the exponential growth of storage, I'm not worried about this in the least. In my own personal collection I have dozens of lifetimes of information stored. Soon this can be carried in my pocket, offline, if I desire.
A better question is what to do with the petabytes of collected information we're amassing... aside from training our replacements via AI.
..don't panic
So that's why i'm going to respond to it with a counter-argument. Sure, you preserve things as VMs. That is great. The hard drive or flash drive that you have the data on has a fixed lifespan, probably under 10 years. Unless you copy it to new media regularly, the data dies. This is what Vint is worried about. If I had a book of knowledge printed in the 1700s, it would still be stable today. The bindings would be cracked and we should really reprint it, but if I preserved it in a low humidity environment we'd probably still have the book in a couple hundred years. He wants to be able to say the same about our digital data.
In regards 'preserving what is important', we have no idea what will be considered important in the future. The Romans ended up preserving Cicero's letters, a few other sets of correspondence, some plays and novels, a regrettable few nonfiction manuals for medicine and war, and mostly annals and chronicles of war and emperors.
Vegetius got preserved because it was a military manual, yet if you had asked a learned Roman about what works they would have preserved, it wouldn't have been that. They probably would have favored one of the histories or the Aeneid (of which we got bits and pieces of the history, but we did get the Aeneid).
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
The earlier media seem to have a kind of timeless longevity while modern media from the 1800s forward seem to have shrinking lifetimes. Just as the monks and Muslims of the Middle Ages preserved content by copying into new media, won't we need to do the same for our modern content...?
Well, I don't know about Vint Cerf, but every time I upgrade my hard drive, the old one gets copied to a subdirectory of the new one. It's "C:\OLD_C_DRIVE\..." all the way down!
my, your, his/her/its, our, your, their
I'm, you're, he's/she's/it's, we're, you're, they're
The fact is that we're producing now a lot of digital data that is in a really perishable form, so you could have a lot of difficult to read media where maybe there's some interesting information to save.
Of course you will have interesting data that we are going to lose. We've always had that and probably always will. Some of the losses are going to be tragic.
I'm not saying it isn't a real problem but I dispute the notion that our ability to preserve the historical record is any more fragile that it ever has been. If anything I'd argue that it's better today in many ways because we have the ability to easily and quickly transfer data to new formats in many cases. Plus we can generate hard copies of a lot of it FAR more efficiently than we ever could in days of yore.
Thanks for the link, didn't know that!
There is hope that NSA surveillance data will eventually be indecipherable. Thanks Vince.
Aren't books just another form of optical media?
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
Answer is easy, but nobody wants to fund it. Simply print your stuff on something like the Rosetta Project (http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/) every once in a while. I guess we could technically do a backup of wikipedia every once in a while.
Video of some good progressive thrash music
With all due respect, this statement is just wrong:
"Clay tablets are more resilient than papyrus manuscripts are more resilient than parchment are more resilient than printed photographs are more resilient than digital photographs."
Digital photographs are infinitely resilient, because they can be infinitely copied with perfect accuracy. Analog mediums do not have this feature.
It may indeed be harder to erase a clay tablet, but because it is so difficult to produce, there's only ever one. Analog photography may be easier to erase than a clay tablet, but there's likely to be more of them. So one could argue (as it is in the opening of I, Claudius) that cheaper mediums are more resilient.
And digital is infinitely copy-able, for free and perfectly, so in effect there are an infinity of them. Sure, the physical media they are stored on may one day degrade, but they should have already been copied to millions of others, and continually do so, forever.
The monkeywrench in this equation is not physical, but legal. If copyright prevents you from making those copies, they will disappear. Not could, WILL. Modern "everything is copyrighted" is a far greater risk to posterity than anything to do with the medium.
Books. Paper books. For every serious e-book, make sure it's backed up with at least a limited printing.
Support your local library.
Early muslims preserved much of the classical era knowledge, and built on it. As to who torched the Library of Alexandria, that's still a contentious issue up for debate; no one is sure. They filled the void left by the collapse of the Roman Empire, and fortunately they decided knowledge was valuable. Islamic nations have seriously regressed since then, but that was a different time.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
My wife did her Thesis on this topic. It's Entitled:
E-Ternally Yours: The case for the development of a reliable repository for the preservation of personal digital objects.
The PDF can be read at the link below
http://explorer.cyberstreet.co...
The ironic thing is that of all the archive formats I've used, .rar has been quite reliable. I managed to recover some files from a ten year old set of CD-Rs that were in WinRAR segments, even though one of the disks was bad, because when I burned the disks, I had a few .rev files in place, so I used that in place of the bad CD, and got everything back.
Barring a mass extinction event, computers will be around, so we will have some method of reading optical media (just because optical drives are so prevalent.) I would hazard to assert that a good quality CD-R with a bunch of PDF/a documents will still be readable in some fashion 50-100 years from now.
No, they weren't fine, upstanding God Fearing Christians (who were busily destroying the rest of the Indoeuropean continent). They were nasty, bad smelling, violent, backstabbing lying bastards.
Just like the rest of humanity.
Get used to it.
'Onward Christian soldiers, marching on to war .....'
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
That is a myth. Islam was a major reason for centuries of the dark ages in Europe as Islam carried on a war on Europe for centuries burning over 90% of all written knowledge because only the Koran mattered.
You know, Fox isn't a very good source of historical knowledge. Hysterical perhaps, but that's a different topic.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
So, you're saying we need a Crusade level genocidal event every couple of hundred years to keep human civilization from losing ancient knowledge?
Lovely.
Maybe we should encourage the Vogons to build that expressway.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
And if only I hadn't committed my instruction manuals to soluble bubble film, would be the first to the barricades.
Ooh, a shiny penny!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I had I good chuckle when I read the mouseover text on that one...
Here at the UW, we encode data into DNA. It's a great, and compact, method of storing information, especially when you have a G CAT.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
So we know they weren't good enough for people to copy them into the modern day.
Shakespeare wrote a number of quite mediocre plays, ones that are virtually never performed anymore because nobody likes them. We know this, because they still exist.
Breakfast served all day!
The problem with pencil is that it can be erased (and with enough jostling around over the years, the process of erasure is automatic).
Modern pens that advertise "pigment based inks" are pretty much archival. What that means is that there's an actual pigment, some kind of mineral like carbon or ochre, that gives the ink its color. These tend to be lightfast, as opposed to the dyes used in older inks, and the binders tend to be waterproof when dry.
Breakfast served all day!
Ironically, he's speaking about the most narcissistic generation this planet has ever known, who spends every day self-documenting on social media.
And before telephone calls became widely affordable, people spent their days "self-documenting" in diaries, journals, and letters. Try getting some friends, you might like it.
Breakfast served all day!
oh yeah, like being an ant genealogist is a hard job : "Queen -> everybody else"
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
If we just put our data on survivable media - stuff that doesn't require electricity and/or moving parts - we would be covered. No need for swords, rapine and enslavement.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
When I'm dead, why should I care what happens to future people?
Careful, take that attitude and people aren't going to care about you in particular while you're alive. You'll be seen more as a leech, a parasite.
Speaking of lasting knowledge, perhaps that Arctic seed vault should have accompanying knowledge vault
Or some sort of "Library of Congress."
Yes, people of all races and denominations have been dicks.
A few details however:
While the British forced Opium into China, the other whites such as the Protugese and Netherlands were quite happy to kowtow to the emperor. In fact they all had a hearty laugh when (decades before the opium wars) the british put on a tough guy act after being told to play by the rules like everyone else.
Xenocide in the americas is certainly a gross exageration: Yes dozens of millions of Indians in the North Amerikas perished by diseases. However the knowledge at that time (barely out of the middle ages) was not high enough to understand how diseases worked, much less to deliberately use them as weapon.
Meanwhile as far as the Apaches and the Commanches are concerned, xenocide would have been perfectly legitimate: We are talking about two tribes whose savagery and sheer cruelty puts everyone today, inlcuding the nazis and North Korea to shame. They would travel hundreds of miles to wipe out one familiy. And before those people were allowed to die, every male in the tribe would rape the females and the females of the tribe would torture to death the children. (I am not going to link a source here, there exist tons of eyewitness reports which I personally find nauseating)
The situation in South Americas was comparable, the non-Inka tribes were more than happy to cooperate with the spaniards as it would mean that fewer of their numbers would be hunted down and have their hearts ripped out while still alive as a sacrifice to some pagan deity.
Muslim tolerance of other religion waxed and waned over time. Christians and Jews were at time so heavily taxed that they faced the choice of either converting or starving. The non-book-religions (i.e. those not mentioned in the Quran) faced no such choice: they either converted or were executed.
And lets not forget that the reason why slavery is so looked down upon today came also from white people.
(I am no white supremacist or anything like that, but I see this "Evil white christian men have always been the worst" way of thinking particularly prevalent on the internet, even though it is not based on facts)
You'd have to do some math comparing lifespans of paper and flash, CD, HDD, etc...
No you don't. Reason being that the lifespan of the data will not be dependent in most cases on the specific media it is initially saved to. It is dependent on the ease with which it can be transferred to new media with reasonable fidelity to the original. Modern computers make doing this easier than it has ever been. I can transmit every digital record I control around the globe in a matter of minutes. At long as we can avoid extinction level catastrophes a good portion of that is likely to survive for a substantial time. Plus much of it has been printed to paper and to other media and some portion of that will last a good while too based on our long experience with paper records. No I suspect quite a bit will survive, probably more than has in the past baring biblical catastrophes.
Much will be lost but that's no different than it has ever been. Not everything is worth saving anyway. It's a funny thought experiment to consider how generations 1000 years from now will regard our current behavior as most likely crude and they will be missing vast amounts of information and context to make sense of what little has survived. The way we describe civilizations from long ago is kind of like how we describe a pack of wild apes. I imagine future generations will do the same to use.
I recall once reading a strategy for recording all of human knowledge by scribing a single scratch somewhere along the length of a long metal rod. First, represent the data as a long string of binary digits, like we already do in computers. Place a decimal point in front of the first digit. Scribe the scratch at a point in the rod corresponding to that fraction of its length.
Needless to say, this would require a VERY long rod, and a bit of engineering to sort out the the thermal complexities. ;)
Sorry, but that is total bullshit.
There are so many examples throughout history.
Pyramid. How did they build them? What were they for? At the time, they sure as fuck thought they were important, yet today, we have no damn idea how they they actually did it or even why the hell they did it.
Ancient Greece? We know a little about it, but must was lost.
Hell, we are not even positive we came from earth. There are credible theories which say we are from another planet. Surely that would be important enough to matter?
Not saying I think that, but no one can say for sure because we have no records.
Even stone can wear over time.
Exactly - what matters for data retention is the data volume times the decay rate not just the decay rate itself. In the current information age we have far, far more of our lives and knowledge documented many, many times over. While a good deal of that data is on far more ephemeral media not all of it is. For example if we consider carved inscriptions on buildings and other stone memorials we still probably save more data this way than ancient civilizations did. We tend to neglect it as trivial compared to the data we save in other ways because it is but the total rate - and content - is probably comparable to ancient civilizations.
However we also have data stored in printed media some of which are books of which there are millions of copies some of which are high quality but even those that are not the more rapid degradation can be somewhat offset by the far, far higher number of copies. This, along with the ease of making copies, suggests that the trivialities of life are still just as likely to be kept as they were before. In the past it took someone to keep a box of old love letters or a handwritten journal etc. in suitable conditions for it to survive through the centuries. Now that journal may have thousands of digital copies - each may have a lower chance of surviving but if even one does the data are preserved.
In that case, he still is
Did you get funny euro symbols and circumflexes like when manishs posts a story here?
I wondered if that was part of the joke.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The destruction of the Library of Alexandria is an example of how digital "staying power" is at least on the level of the vaunted hard copy approach. As noted earlier, the facility to create, distribute and store copies is just as important towards "media longevity" as the media's physical endurance.
Perhaps gold platters with a system much like LP records could contain information that could be retrieved with fairly simple efforts. The problems would include wars and thefts, the deliberate altering of facts, burglaries , and opposition by various governments. Also deciding what is fact and what is opinion in the original proposed data would cause endless strife. issues like who shot JFK or the qualities of current presidential candidates, would include all kinds of disagreements. Can you imagine such a disk that contained "elements within the US government, combined with the military, industrial complex, used resources within the Maffia to kill president John F. Kennedy." being acceptable to the US government?
Yes. Not sure if that machine I was at had utf8 set up though. I will try on a different machine later.
JPEG and PNG images stored on a USB thumb drive in a FAT data partition aren't going away anytime soon, short of the mother of all EMP events. And even then, there will be thumb drives someone tossed into a large jar of loose change that miraculously survived the pulse.
USB flash drives market to reach annual volume sales of 561 million units by 2018 — article text completely worthless (bold word my addition; you know you've worked in marketing too long if you've never actually seen a denominator written down). Average drive capacity is presently heading into the 32 GB range. Can you quickly multiply 32 GB by 500 million? It's not hard. Go!
I grew up with Carl Sagan. "Billions and billions" used to be shorthand for mind-blowing ubiquity. Yet somehow we're suffering from a preservation crisis. I'm having a little trouble squaring the Drake equation on this particular tempest in a teapot.
Even if we only had the thumb drives rescued from giant jars of loose change after the mother of all EMPs, we'd still retain more knowledge about the present day than what we presently know about the life and times of Joseph Smith, much less any of his deep-antiquity antecedents.
The point isn't to have everything survive. The point is to have enough of it survive that future people can piece together things about our time based upon imperfect reproduction of our suite of data. If 10% of our documents survive, i'd consider it a win.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
its imperative that we retain every stupid facebook post for eternity. NOT.
Seriously though. I can't remember where I read it, but apparently mankind has generated factors more data over the past 10 years than in the entire rest of our civilized history, and the problem is getting worse as we go on.
We clearly need some form of process of natural selection for data.
I'm completely OK with the "clearing out boxes in the garage" principle. If you haven't missed it for 2 years, let it go.
Do you happen to have a stone writer with a SCSI-2 Interface I could buy? I will settle for 1600bpi PE if it has read-after-write and full documentation in Latin and English.
Seriously, has anyone tried writing digital data onto clay using a Scully disk cutter? Bake the clay, and you will have a good few millenia of data life!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
If you are a person concerned about your information being useful/relevant to future generations - then you must curate the data (basically filter the raw data and add context to create information). Raw data of every moment of your lifetime is too much data to be relevant to human beings - although computers may find it useful -- assuming the algorithms and AI used to process it is perfect -=- which isn't likely. Of course, online services don't do this well at all - and there are no guarantees your data will survive the next merger or retirement of the companies behind the services your information is tied up in.
If your information is a program, or the output of a program, then you should build programs that take into account the need to preserve their runtime environment and provide conversion of data to open standards (e.g. xml etc) that can be reproduced easily without the need of a specific program. Virtual machines are an excellent means of doing this over time - and have had success in keeping old console games alive.
Finally - storage technology itself will evolve over time - and now that most things are in a digital form, migrating the data to the new technologies is relatively painless.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
... because I am pretty sure my GF's mom has already printed out the whole internet.
.. pa-ra-bo-la, pa-ra-bo-la, 2 pi R, 2 pi R, where's your latus rectum, where's your latus rectum, 2 pi R
I tried it on a machine with utf8 set up properly (as far as I can tell) and it does that. Maybe it's part of the joke - in the future maybe it'll deal with unicode properly!
During the middle ages, they did preserve a hell of a lot of documents - and they created a number of mathematical concepts which are core today, like algebra and the very concept of 0 as a mathematical symbol.
Are they still preservers of culture? Not now; I think that it's clear that the current extremist Islamist religious movements have entirely abandoned the concept of knowledge acquisition as a way to improve the world.
But whatever they are now, they preserved information during the dark ages that would otherwise have been lost. And a lot of what they preserved is core Western philosophy - Hellenic philosophers like Aristotle, Plato, Heraclitus, Thales of Milesius, Anaximander, Pythagoras, and a host of others. And we'd all be poorer for the loss of those texts.
"Truth is what works" -- William James "It works!!" -- o-dark-AM comment
"Muslims of the Middle Ages preserved content"
What a bunch of horseshit.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Middle Ages preserved content by copying into new media,
What did the muzzies ever preserve except for the Qur'an? They sacked libraries, destroyed artifacts and plagiarized a few technical documents ... much as they do today
The usual Muslim apologists modded this down, but chrisq is right. They burnt down the Great Library of Alexandria, and Caliph Umar, who ordered it, said that if the books in that library endorse the Qur'an, they are redundant, and if they contradict it, they are blasphemous'.
People talk about the 'golden age of Islamic scholarship', but most of that was the initial wave of Iranians who had just been converted to Islam, like al Khwarezmi - the guy they credit for algebra. Once Islam actually set in and got digested, the only scholarly work they did were Islamic works, like the hadiths. Oh, and anything that made them more efficient in their massacres of infidels
Uh, Fox doesn't cover events outside the US, so blaming them for 'Islamophobia' is a red herring
How does your statement refute the GP's statement that the initial wave of Muslim conquests resulted in the massacres and coerced conversions of the peoples of the Byzantine, Sassanid and various Indian empires? The summary at the top says nothing about Christians, but credits Muslims w/ preserving knowledge. But Islam had and has a concept called 'Jahaliya', where any knowledge that came preceding Islam that's not endorsed by Mohammed in either the Qur'an or Sunnah is illegitimate, and worthy of being eradicated. That is independent of whether Christianity has anything like it.
If Trump wins, the US will leave NATO and form an invincible bloc w/ Russia, which no one can defeat. There will be no WW, and we will stop bellyaching about potential immigrant rapists from Allepo being killed, since Russia will be our new ally. In which event, we'll need to look into long term storage. The most that I've seen from flash memory is split gate NOR flash that would last 100 years, but what about beyond then?
Seek time sucks. And rotational delay? Forget it.
They can take my LifeAlert pendant when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
One of the big causes of mankind going into Dark Ages is because of Active Human Destruction of Information. During the Roman Empire, Emperors would 'Damnify', or have destroyed all record of the prior emperor, if they really did not like them. Similarly, for religious reasons, entire swathes of writings and information were destroyed (e.g. the Library of Alexandria, the Thalia of Arius), with secular or religious support. Today Islamic terrorists exclaim how any word except the Koran is worthy of destruction. Perhaps a greater threat than the media, is associating intellectual ideas with political, religious or cultural works, so that they can progress neutrally through time. Even the first temple we know about, Gobekli Tepe, was buried 8000 years ago, probably to protect it from similar destruction. Making a mural, with pictures from reality, and words associated with the pictures, and making sure they are culturally, religiously, and politically neutral, is probably one good way to preserve them. If you will, a picture book of knowledge in mural form.
Oh and the new Word documents are more difficult since they're zipped. Would proabaly be easier to figure out how to run a VM then.
Or at least APPNOTE.TXT which describes the PKZIP format in English, or the Info-ZIP distribution, which describes it in machine-readable C.
The rationale behind the present copyright term is that those heirs who had had direct contact with an author are in the best position to know how the author wanted the work exploited. Hence a copyright term that approximates the life of the author's grandchildren. The 1990s extension from life plus 50 to life plus 70 didn't change the rationale as much as reflect increased life expectancy.
A lot of the clay tablets basically contain accounting information - they weren't meant to last.
If you are speaking of the Caliphate, the largest and most influential Islamic power during that period, then it wasn't freedom of religion in any sense as we know it today. It was freedom of religion as long as you accepted literal, formal, socioeconomic second-class citizen status. This was still better than say, being burned at the stake, and it was certainly enlightened by the standards of that time period, but I want readers to fully understand the context.
Printed and bounded items on paper are really the only items that will make it. Copyright and this insane Intellectual rights management will prevent that. In the last 16 yrs we have seen this happen habitually.
Try to pull up something oscure from pre 9/11. If its out of print it is still gone unless it was in print. 80% of all the movies ever made are already gone.
Some of Shakespeare's works don't exist in original form or copies from original form, but were recreated from actor's memories.
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Pencil wears off. If you want to preserve pencil marks, spray with an archival clear coating.
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Les Paul was not a Middle Ages Muslim.
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Read the wikipedia article on zero. The claim that zero in any sense originated with Muslims is false.
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On second thought, you may be right that a large nonfiction corpus, such as Simple English Wikipedia, will help put parables such as The Lorax in context. So we'd have the Dr. Seuss stuff and instructions to build a microscope engraved at naked-eye size, then the rest of the corpus engraved on microcards.
I'm concerned about private technical advances they are "owned" for a time by one company and may be known to a small number if individuals. With corporate copyright and patent period getting longer and longer we risk losing that work because it is so narrowly held.
Only boring people are ever bored.
In the future there will be an obscurely incompatible encoding.
Ah, Wikipedia is apparently infallible when it supports your opinions.
You're so rabidly opposed to the idea that civilizations have different periods, some enlightened and some not, that you're willing to ignore factual information.
Doesn't bode well for whatever society you're a member of.
"Truth is what works" -- William James "It works!!" -- o-dark-AM comment