That's a perfectly fair point of view, but people like you aren't the ones I'm archiving for. I'm making a small effort now to preserve the history of our family for those few people in our lineage 100 years from now who have an active sense of history and who understand, in a similar way to my own, the importance of not losing the past. In a similar vein, I praise the efforts of like-minded family members of mine who lived 100 years ago.
This is a process, and a job, handed down from generation to generation amongst people who understand the need for it. I fully expect that the majority of people in our family tree 100 years from now will have little more than a passing interest in my efforts. That's not what's important to me.
Nobody can guarantee that any format will be readable in 25 years. Preserving the information requires that somebody does the job of format conversion every say, 10 years or so.
Preservation of historical data, particularly digital data, is an active process.
Should a fire, hurricane, etc. strike, they're gone
Absolutely. Digital format is less user-friendly for now, no doubt about it, but the point you raise is the single most important factor in why people should make digital backups of at least the most important photos.
Personally I'm currently digitizing some 500+ family photos going right back to the 1880s, all at 600 dpi (greater, for the small ones) in RGB format (then converted to LAB then grayscale for the B&W photos). Once the job is done I'll be burning them all onto sets of those Kodak archive-quality CDRs and distributing them to various cousins and other relatives spread all across North America. I anticipate having to switch the set over to new media about every ten years or so. With so many (say, four or five) extra copies of the complete set it shouldn't be a problem to reconstruct the archive even if a CD goes bad here and there. Call me paranoid, but I've even considered creating some kind of parity-CD system for recovery purposes (ala PAR files).
At the end of the day, I think making this kind of thing work requires that someone in your family commit to being a data archivist, and that this job does in fact get switched over to new individuals as the decades go by.
Is this really true? Every time I do a search on Ebay to see what my old crap would bring, I find that a dozen other people have been trying to flog the same crap and have generally received zero bids.
I suppose it is possible that I just have really bad crap.
In all fairness however I did once buy a book for 25 cents that I knew had a small demand on Ebay, and turned around and sold it there for $25, which was nice.
Sorry everyone, I don't normally reply to my own posts, but after thinking about it for a bit I realized it would be irresponsible to have included a link to a crazy site like Vreeland's without also including a link to a sane analysis of why he is in fact a nutter.
Here is a careful, balanced, and thoughtful examination of The 9-11 X-Files
It's all pretty X-files, and while quite a few "microbiologists" (defined loosely, as some of the people have not really been true microbiologists) have died under mysterious circumstances lately I can't shake the feeling that the story is being "shaped" into this whole conspiracy dogma format.
Anyway, here's a link to one of the nutball sites (this is Mike Vreeland's "The Government Made 9-11 Happen" site) which has some writeups on it.
Proceed with caution. You're reading heavy spin here...
Change or Delete the Data?
on
Data Quality Act
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Fabulous. Now lawyers will be the final framers of the scientific and technical truth. They've done such a spectacular job with the concept of "justice" that this is only the next logical step.
Lots of things have been described as "Orwellian" lately, and this just follows the trend...
Maybe not so surprising - the advent of television "locked down" english to a greater degree, I suspect, than was the case when regional dialects could evolve and spread without everyone being aware of how funny they sounded. Now there's a standard ("broadcast english") to compare with. Not that this is going to petrify the language, but it could slow it down...
I'm puzzled by your antipathy to this topic. It really doesn't deserve to be placed in with the tinfoil-hat crowd. Its actually a pretty common type of scientific story, with the exception of the Reagan/Bush antidrug connection.
1970s - american researchers find some antitumorigenic activity with THC. Interesting, needs to be followed up.
1980s - the drug war begins, and as a political move the Reaganites want all government-backed drug-related research trashed. Not a move many in the scientific world would agree with, but that's politics. The research in question has not been trashed, however, in that much of it is replicated in libraries around the globe.
1990s - another group comes up with some interesting antitumorigenic results using THC. Again interesting, but not the "cure" for cancer. Just another research avenue to follow. Forget the drug connection, this is about biochemistry.
No need for conspiracy theories. The "project censored" spin on the tale is a bit X-Files heavy, however.
If you took a spaceship toward the Cone Nebula and you got close enough to see it, it would probably look mostly grey
Unless of course the pupil of your eye was several kilometers (or maybe just meters?) wide and your retina had a reasonably long exposure time. I suspect that the nebula would then come out in all the psychedelic colors we're used to.
Since Hubble already extends our eyes into realms that it cannot penetrate naturally, I can't get too worked up about the color alterations. Any Hubble picture already beings with "Pretend your eye is in orbit, is really really big, and has sub-arcsecond resolution..."
As far as our little monkey eyes go, just about everything in the universe is boring gray.
The nature of the international game really has changed. Nobody (nobody) can compete with the US of A anymore.
Solution: for nation-states, don't even try. China has a billion cheap laborers and endless patience. All your base may well really belong to them one day. The EU will never be a military giant (in the near term, anyway) but has the potential to be an economic collossus. Live well, buy shiny toys, and let the USA spend hard-earned dollars building another fifty carriers, another constellation of military sats, and another round of missiles. Who cares? Classical war is a sucker's game now - only loser states run by maniacs even think about it. Countries that matter can protect their interests by a million subtle monetary and legal means. The real winners for the next century will be the states that can exploit those parameters.
Does this mean I like being under Uncle Sam's oft-times simpleminded thumb? Not particularly, but that's the world we live in.
You should check out this link, which explains the fairly extensive work done with these devices (Ionocraft) in the 1960's. Here's a quote (sorry for the overexplained nature of the text):
High negative voltage is shot from the spikes toward the positively charged wire grid, just like negative and positive poles on an ordinary battery. As the negative charge leaves the spike arms, it peppers the surrounding air like buckshot, putting a negative charge on some of the air particles. Such negatively charged air particles are called ions, and these are attracted downward by the positively charged grid.
"Okay," I said. "But I still don't see what holds it up." "I'm getting to that," Yorysh assured me as he spelled out the rest of the Ionocraft principle. In their mad rush from the ion emitter to the main grid, the ions bump into neutral air molecules-air particles without electric charge.
The terrific wallop in these collisions hurls a mass of neutral air down-ward along with ions. When they reach that air grid, the ions being negative are trapped by positive charge on the grid. but the grid has no attraction for the neutral air particles that got bumped along. So the air flows right through the open grid mesh, making a downdraft beneath the Ionocraft. The contraption rides on this shaft of air, getting lift just like a helicopter - by sucking air down from the top.
I'm sure someone out there has an elaborate and consistent backstory for the aliens, but just for myself I was always under the impression that they didn't evolve, as such. They're the biological equivalent of a partially buried landmine sitting next to a schoolyard - nasty bioweapons, remnants of some former conflict that had nothing to do with us.
True. My mother is 81, and has been a pretty obsessive computer user for nigh on 20 years now. She regularly upgrades her system, helps out other old folks with their computers at the place where she lives, and is on the net damn near as much as any 20 year old cyberphile. I've even run across the occasional thing in her url history list that I had to do an immediate mental CTRL-ALT-DELETE about.
I didn't think it was as bad as could be, really. Losing the Pluto-Kuiper probe is a bummer, but there's still pretty strong (in relative terms for today's financial climate) support for basic science.
More to the point - Nuclear Propulsion - Hooray!. This is an utterly fabulous development, and I'm probably going to get flamed for saying so. It's still the truth, all the same. Decent nuclear propulsion is the only way to reduce the current long flight times around the solar system.
The image on the BBC site is an edge-on view of our galaxy. The story submission for this is a bit misleading. There are no pictures anywhere on the MASS site which show a "top-down" view which shows us the bars (unless there's one I've missed - anyone?).
Sorry to reply to my own post, but just for clarification before somebody jumps down my throat: By referring to Jupiter as low-mass I meant in relation to the large number of >2Mj planets discovered thus far.
The whole business with "billions of earths" is just so much media noise. It was put in by the reporter to act as an attractive theme for the story.
The paper has nothing to do with terrestrial planets, and has precious little to say about them. What it is is the latest in a series of very interesting analyses of the bulk dataset of extrasolar planets collected thus far. Lineweaver argues that portions of the dataset are biased due to observational artifacts (primarily that they haven't been observed long enough yet or with sufficiently powerfull technology). When these portions are left out or are "corrected" with some very basic assumptions, there is a trend in the data which appears to indicate that low mass (ie Jupiter-sized), long period, low eccentricity planets may be very common indeed.
Nothing to say at all about terrestrials. Maybe, maybe not, but the issue is irrelevant to the science at hand.
Anyone who is really interested in extrasolar planets should go get the preprint. Some of the figures are just stunning - they look like the start of a real "Encyclopedia Galactica".
For me there's only one set of books that, in addition to being better observing references than anything you'll find out there on CD, really capture what it is to love the night sky. Burnham's Celestial Handbook, published as three huge volumes in updated form in 1983 remains a true classic.
I hardly know where to begin in urging you to own these books. First of all don't be put off by their age. They may not be up to date on all the shiniest new astrophysics, but that's utterly unimportant compared to the huge number of treasures contained within them. The Celestial Handbook is an encyclopedic journey through the deep sky objects visible to an amateur telescope, organized alphabetically by constellation as a compilation of descriptions, observing notes, mythology, finder charts, photos, poetry, orbital diagrams, illustrations, light curves and tables.
If you feel like you've moved beyond the "Welcome to The Milky Way Galaxy" level of popular astronomical literature, these books will fill the gap in abundance. Each chapter starts off with a comprehensive list of objects to be seen in each constellation complete with notes about how they appear in amateur telescopes. After this there is page after page of detailed description about the most significant objects ranging from observing methods to mythology and ancient history. It is a tour guide for the observable universe, taking stops to examine a multitude of clusters, variable stars, supernova remnants, nebula, galaxies, and much more.
Insofar as the astronomy is dated, the effect really isn't very bad. Burnham was an astronomer at Lowell for many decades, and knew what he was on about. This issue is entirely outweighed by the masses of practical advice and genuine wonder to be found on just about every page. The observing experience of a lifetime went into these books.
Burnham was an astronomer by trade, and a poet by inclination. The Celestial Handbook makes this clear from beginning to end. I've owned my copy for almost twenty years now, and I'll never part with it.
Wow. That's so close to my own experience it's almost spooky. My daughter's favourite videos were the W&G trilogy from ages 2-4. She has moved on now, but still flips them in from time to time.
Ditto on the Arthur comment BTW - this is the only kid's show I find myself deliberately sitting down to watch when my daughter has it on. The story (as always) is the key - the writing is for kids, but it is never childish. Funny, insightfull, and pointed.
I've been wracking my brains to think of something else that's almost as good, and the one thing I've come up with is Playmobil, which is one of the better (albeit pretty expensive) toy sets around. I honestly enjoy sitting down with my daughter and playing with this stuff. The quality and detail are amazing.
I'm curious where you see this leading - would the USA eventually be filled with 200 million high-level programmers and contractors selling their services to one another? Who would be answering the phones in call centers? Or flipping your burgers? Or pushing the mop that keeps your shiny floors so clean?
Like it or not, the _majority_ of people are usually pretty content with their jobs as long as they have a living wage. Going past $35K in return for more stress and less free time seems like a bad tradeoff to them.
They are the ones who will be radically impacted by this kind of change (and they are by far in the majority) - not Joe Motivation, who would never have stayed on the $35K job anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a perfectly fair point of view, but people like you aren't the ones I'm archiving for. I'm making a small effort now to preserve the history of our family for those few people in our lineage 100 years from now who have an active sense of history and who understand, in a similar way to my own, the importance of not losing the past. In a similar vein, I praise the efforts of like-minded family members of mine who lived 100 years ago.
This is a process, and a job, handed down from generation to generation amongst people who understand the need for it. I fully expect that the majority of people in our family tree 100 years from now will have little more than a passing interest in my efforts. That's not what's important to me.
Nobody can guarantee that any format will be readable in 25 years. Preserving the information requires that somebody does the job of format conversion every say, 10 years or so.
Preservation of historical data, particularly digital data, is an active process.
Should a fire, hurricane, etc. strike, they're gone
Absolutely. Digital format is less user-friendly for now, no doubt about it, but the point you raise is the single most important factor in why people should make digital backups of at least the most important photos.
Personally I'm currently digitizing some 500+ family photos going right back to the 1880s, all at 600 dpi (greater, for the small ones) in RGB format (then converted to LAB then grayscale for the B&W photos). Once the job is done I'll be burning them all onto sets of those Kodak archive-quality CDRs and distributing them to various cousins and other relatives spread all across North America. I anticipate having to switch the set over to new media about every ten years or so. With so many (say, four or five) extra copies of the complete set it shouldn't be a problem to reconstruct the archive even if a CD goes bad here and there. Call me paranoid, but I've even considered creating some kind of parity-CD system for recovery purposes (ala PAR files).
At the end of the day, I think making this kind of thing work requires that someone in your family commit to being a data archivist, and that this job does in fact get switched over to new individuals as the decades go by.
Is this really true? Every time I do a search on Ebay to see what my old crap would bring, I find that a dozen other people have been trying to flog the same crap and have generally received zero bids.
I suppose it is possible that I just have really bad crap.
In all fairness however I did once buy a book for 25 cents that I knew had a small demand on Ebay, and turned around and sold it there for $25, which was nice.
Ruppert, right. I suppose many would argue that checking the names before I use blithely use them would be a good thing. My bad.
Sorry everyone, I don't normally reply to my own posts, but after thinking about it for a bit I realized it would be irresponsible to have included a link to a crazy site like Vreeland's without also including a link to a sane analysis of why he is in fact a nutter.
Here is a careful, balanced, and thoughtful examination of The 9-11 X-Files
It's all pretty X-files, and while quite a few "microbiologists" (defined loosely, as some of the people have not really been true microbiologists) have died under mysterious circumstances lately I can't shake the feeling that the story is being "shaped" into this whole conspiracy dogma format.
Anyway, here's a link to one of the nutball sites (this is Mike Vreeland's "The Government Made 9-11 Happen" site) which has some writeups on it.
Proceed with caution. You're reading heavy spin here...
Fabulous. Now lawyers will be the final framers of the scientific and technical truth. They've done such a spectacular job with the concept of "justice" that this is only the next logical step.
Lots of things have been described as "Orwellian" lately, and this just follows the trend...
Maybe not so surprising - the advent of television "locked down" english to a greater degree, I suspect, than was the case when regional dialects could evolve and spread without everyone being aware of how funny they sounded. Now there's a standard ("broadcast english") to compare with. Not that this is going to petrify the language, but it could slow it down...
I'm puzzled by your antipathy to this topic. It really doesn't deserve to be placed in with the tinfoil-hat crowd. Its actually a pretty common type of scientific story, with the exception of the Reagan/Bush antidrug connection.
1970s - american researchers find some antitumorigenic activity with THC. Interesting, needs to be followed up.
1980s - the drug war begins, and as a political move the Reaganites want all government-backed drug-related research trashed. Not a move many in the scientific world would agree with, but that's politics. The research in question has not been trashed, however, in that much of it is replicated in libraries around the globe.
1990s - another group comes up with some interesting antitumorigenic results using THC. Again interesting, but not the "cure" for cancer. Just another research avenue to follow. Forget the drug connection, this is about biochemistry.
No need for conspiracy theories. The "project censored" spin on the tale is a bit X-Files heavy, however.
If you took a spaceship toward the Cone Nebula and you got close enough to see it, it would probably look mostly grey
Unless of course the pupil of your eye was several kilometers (or maybe just meters?) wide and your retina had a reasonably long exposure time. I suspect that the nebula would then come out in all the psychedelic colors we're used to.
Since Hubble already extends our eyes into realms that it cannot penetrate naturally, I can't get too worked up about the color alterations. Any Hubble picture already beings with "Pretend your eye is in orbit, is really really big, and has sub-arcsecond resolution..."
As far as our little monkey eyes go, just about everything in the universe is boring gray.
Even better is the misspelling...
"Think Unthinkble!"
I think this will be my new motto.
The nature of the international game really has changed. Nobody (nobody) can compete with the US of A anymore.
Solution: for nation-states, don't even try. China has a billion cheap laborers and endless patience. All your base may well really belong to them one day. The EU will never be a military giant (in the near term, anyway) but has the potential to be an economic collossus. Live well, buy shiny toys, and let the USA spend hard-earned dollars building another fifty carriers, another constellation of military sats, and another round of missiles. Who cares? Classical war is a sucker's game now - only loser states run by maniacs even think about it. Countries that matter can protect their interests by a million subtle monetary and legal means. The real winners for the next century will be the states that can exploit those parameters.
Does this mean I like being under Uncle Sam's oft-times simpleminded thumb? Not particularly, but that's the world we live in.
You should check out this link, which explains the fairly extensive work done with these devices (Ionocraft) in the 1960's. Here's a quote (sorry for the overexplained nature of the text):
High negative voltage is shot from the spikes toward the positively charged wire grid, just like negative and positive poles on an ordinary battery. As the negative charge leaves the spike arms, it peppers the surrounding air like buckshot, putting a negative charge on some of the air particles. Such negatively charged air particles are called ions, and these are attracted downward by the positively charged grid.
"Okay," I said. "But I still don't see what holds it up." "I'm getting to that," Yorysh assured me as he spelled out the rest of the Ionocraft principle. In their mad rush from the ion emitter to the main grid, the ions bump into neutral air molecules-air particles without electric charge.
The terrific wallop in these collisions hurls a mass of neutral air down-ward along with ions. When they reach that air grid, the ions being negative are trapped by positive charge on the grid. but the grid has no attraction for the neutral air particles that got bumped along. So the air flows right through the open grid mesh, making a downdraft beneath the Ionocraft. The contraption rides on this shaft of air, getting lift just like a helicopter - by sucking air down from the top.
I'm sure someone out there has an elaborate and consistent backstory for the aliens, but just for myself I was always under the impression that they didn't evolve, as such. They're the biological equivalent of a partially buried landmine sitting next to a schoolyard - nasty bioweapons, remnants of some former conflict that had nothing to do with us.
Center of the Maritimes, man.
FWIW, this ./-er will be there...
True. My mother is 81, and has been a pretty obsessive computer user for nigh on 20 years now. She regularly upgrades her system, helps out other old folks with their computers at the place where she lives, and is on the net damn near as much as any 20 year old cyberphile. I've even run across the occasional thing in her url history list that I had to do an immediate mental CTRL-ALT-DELETE about.
I didn't think it was as bad as could be, really. Losing the Pluto-Kuiper probe is a bummer, but there's still pretty strong (in relative terms for today's financial climate) support for basic science.
More to the point - Nuclear Propulsion - Hooray!. This is an utterly fabulous development, and I'm probably going to get flamed for saying so. It's still the truth, all the same. Decent nuclear propulsion is the only way to reduce the current long flight times around the solar system.
The image on the BBC site is an edge-on view of our galaxy. The story submission for this is a bit misleading. There are no pictures anywhere on the MASS site which show a "top-down" view which shows us the bars (unless there's one I've missed - anyone?).
Sorry to reply to my own post, but just for clarification before somebody jumps down my throat: By referring to Jupiter as low-mass I meant in relation to the large number of >2Mj planets discovered thus far.
I read the story, and the paper itself.
The whole business with "billions of earths" is just so much media noise. It was put in by the reporter to act as an attractive theme for the story.
The paper has nothing to do with terrestrial planets, and has precious little to say about them. What it is is the latest in a series of very interesting analyses of the bulk dataset of extrasolar planets collected thus far. Lineweaver argues that portions of the dataset are biased due to observational artifacts (primarily that they haven't been observed long enough yet or with sufficiently powerfull technology). When these portions are left out or are "corrected" with some very basic assumptions, there is a trend in the data which appears to indicate that low mass (ie Jupiter-sized), long period, low eccentricity planets may be very common indeed.
Nothing to say at all about terrestrials. Maybe, maybe not, but the issue is irrelevant to the science at hand.
Anyone who is really interested in extrasolar planets should go get the preprint. Some of the figures are just stunning - they look like the start of a real "Encyclopedia Galactica".
For me there's only one set of books that, in addition to being better observing references than anything you'll find out there on CD, really capture what it is to love the night sky. Burnham's Celestial Handbook, published as three huge volumes in updated form in 1983 remains a true classic.
I hardly know where to begin in urging you to own these books. First of all don't be put off by their age. They may not be up to date on all the shiniest new astrophysics, but that's utterly unimportant compared to the huge number of treasures contained within them. The Celestial Handbook is an encyclopedic journey through the deep sky objects visible to an amateur telescope, organized alphabetically by constellation as a compilation of descriptions, observing notes, mythology, finder charts, photos, poetry, orbital diagrams, illustrations, light curves and tables.
If you feel like you've moved beyond the "Welcome to The Milky Way Galaxy" level of popular astronomical literature, these books will fill the gap in abundance. Each chapter starts off with a comprehensive list of objects to be seen in each constellation complete with notes about how they appear in amateur telescopes. After this there is page after page of detailed description about the most significant objects ranging from observing methods to mythology and ancient history. It is a tour guide for the observable universe, taking stops to examine a multitude of clusters, variable stars, supernova remnants, nebula, galaxies, and much more.
Insofar as the astronomy is dated, the effect really isn't very bad. Burnham was an astronomer at Lowell for many decades, and knew what he was on about. This issue is entirely outweighed by the masses of practical advice and genuine wonder to be found on just about every page. The observing experience of a lifetime went into these books.
Burnham was an astronomer by trade, and a poet by inclination. The Celestial Handbook makes this clear from beginning to end. I've owned my copy for almost twenty years now, and I'll never part with it.
Wow. That's so close to my own experience it's almost spooky. My daughter's favourite videos were the W&G trilogy from ages 2-4. She has moved on now, but still flips them in from time to time.
Ditto on the Arthur comment BTW - this is the only kid's show I find myself deliberately sitting down to watch when my daughter has it on. The story (as always) is the key - the writing is for kids, but it is never childish. Funny, insightfull, and pointed.
I've been wracking my brains to think of something else that's almost as good, and the one thing I've come up with is Playmobil, which is one of the better (albeit pretty expensive) toy sets around. I honestly enjoy sitting down with my daughter and playing with this stuff. The quality and detail are amazing.
(Reads the site and the synopsis of the Doomsday argument)
How many angels? On just one pinhead you say?
I'm curious where you see this leading - would the USA eventually be filled with 200 million high-level programmers and contractors selling their services to one another? Who would be answering the phones in call centers? Or flipping your burgers? Or pushing the mop that keeps your shiny floors so clean?
Like it or not, the _majority_ of people are usually pretty content with their jobs as long as they have a living wage. Going past $35K in return for more stress and less free time seems like a bad tradeoff to them.
They are the ones who will be radically impacted by this kind of change (and they are by far in the majority) - not Joe Motivation, who would never have stayed on the $35K job anyway.