Civilization & Media

I was thinking about digital media and I got to wondering what would be a really good choice for permanent storage? Right now, we have Blue-Ray DVD's (at least some people do), which seem to be replacing regular DVD's, which replaced CD's and VHS tapes. I don't know, some video cameras may still be using some kind of tape. Hard disk drives have gotten so cheap that it might be worthwhile to just save all your "stuff" (that's a technical term) on a hard drive, and put the hard drive in a safe place, and just skip the whole writing-everything-on-removable-media business.

Problem with all of these computer type mechanisms is that you need a computer to retrieve the information and a display device of some sort in order to read and/or view it. You could keep a computer around so you can access your archives, but computers are machines and they break down. You could keep replacing your computers with new ones, as long as new ones are available, but then you are going to need to upgrade your storage media, because eventually whatever you are using today is going to be obsolete.

Cloud computing is one way to deal with this problem. Simply upload all your files to some on-line data storage facility and let them worry about all the obsolescence problems. There will be a fee, but not having to deal with equipment and media issues might make it worthwhile. This only works as long as the company that is providing this service is viable and adequately performs their required duties. If the company goes broke, or incompetence creeps in, your whole archive could vanish.

So far we are only talking about normal day-to-day operations. What happens if disaster strikes? If an asteroid falls on your house and smashes all your carefully recorded disks, that would be bad. If it also happens to smush you, well, it wouldn't be a problem anymore. How about if some natural disaster takes out the  on-line data storage facility where you have all your files stored? I suspect some of them have thought of this, and have all your data stored at multiple locations. If one gets wiped out, that's okay, there is another copy somewhere else.

War could be worse than a natural disaster, as the enemy may specifically target data storage facilities. Good size bombs set off at multiple data storage sites would be disastrous for all the data. One idea that gets kicked around is the Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP) associated with nuclear weapons. The idea is that a nuclear bomb set off high in the atmosphere would generate an EMP powerful enough to destroy most integrated circuits and erase all magnetic storage media in the area below the explosion, even if the physical effects of the explosion produced no damage. We're not going to worry about that. As far as we are concerned a bomb is a bomb. It is theoretically possible for all data storage facilities to be destroyed simultaneously by an act of war. Not likely, but possible.

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Some time ago my gang and I were talking about civilization, and how we didn't really know what happened before someone started writing it all down a few thousand years ago. The last great ice age was between 10 and 20 thousand years ago. People have been around for 50 or 100 thousand years. Archeologists keep finding evidence that suggests ancient civilizations were more advanced than we thought. Suppose there was an advanced civilization before the last great ice age. Would there be any evidence of it? The ice sheet would have pretty much scraped everything off the surface, and a good bit of the surface as well. If there was a previous civilization and they buried anything, it hasn't been found yet.

Now we are faced with global warming, which some people think might trigger a new ice age. What kind of archive could you construct that could survive such a calamity? What kind of archive could you construct that would be useful even if our entire infrastructure/civilization were destroyed? It would have to be portable, it would have to be durable, fireproof, flood proof and vermin proof. The oldest written records we have discovered are clay tablets and carved stone. Not exactly portable. Remember the library in Alexandria in Egypt? It burned.

I read something the other day that mentioned if you really wanted to get rid of a dead body, you should just leave it on the surface, not bury it. Left out in the open critters would make short work of it. In a year there would nothing left, except maybe the fillings from the teeth. Burying the body would preserve the bones. Of course, there are the hygiene and stench issues, but that is only a problem if anyone is living in the area. Anyway, all this makes me wonder if the tombs of the pharaohs are not a hold over from some previous civilizations attempt to archive their collected knowledge. Or maybe we are just not sophisticated enough to extract the knowledge that has been encoded there. Whatever.

There was a Science Fiction story I read a few years ago. It was one of a set of stories all based on the same framework: an earth-like planet settled by various groups, but then cut off from space for a long period of time. One group that had just arrived, and in fact were in their space-ships in orbit around this planet realized they were going to have abandon their space ships and move to the planets surface. One of the last things they did before leaving their ships was to print their archives.It amounted to thousands of pages (or maybe millions), but they were not going to be able to build any more computers for a long time to come, but they wanted to take whatever knowledge they could with them.

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Knowledge only becomes useful when it is in someone's head. Recorded knowledge is all very well, if you have the means to access it the know-how to interpret it. Remember the Rosetta Stone? It had three languages on it, one of which was Egyptian hieroglyphics, which no one had been able to understand until this one stinking stone was discovered.

 The only way to maintain an archive is to maintain some semblance of a civilization, and I am afraid the only way to do that is with religion. Religion seems to be only human endeavor that manages to outlast civilization.

Quote of the Day

"Nowadays, it's easy to regard such schemes as impossibly far-fetched," said Christopher Andrew, the official historian of MI5. "But at the time it was reasonable to believe that after the Allied victory there would remain a dangerous postwar Nazi underground which would continue a secret war."

The linked story is talking about some schemes the Nazis were cooking up at the end of WWII. Reading the story I was thinking, well, yeah, you could do all that stuff, and if done properly it could cause considerable trouble. At that point, the outcome of the war was already determined. None of these schemes would have changed that, the German's just didn't have the resources anymore.

So the schemes may have been pointless and futile, but at no time did I ever consider them far-fetched. They were the kind of actions I would expect from a desperate organization. So Christopher Andrew, whoever he is, gets a black mark in my book.

It's kind of like the yahoos who claimed that no one ever imagined a terrorist attack would come via an airliner. I read a story about an attack via a passenger liner forty years ago, so I certainly considered the possibility. I can't imagine everyone in the security business is a dunderhead, though once you get politics involved everything starts to look stupid.

There seems to be a kind of blanket of stupidity over the world. It order to reach the largest number of people you apparently need to dumb down your message so even third graders can understand it: "nothing bad will ever happen, everything is all safe and warm and you don't need to worry about a thing, the establishment will take care of you". Saying something intelligent seems to light a fire under the stupidest people who are then compelled to make a big fuss, which will capture an audience of dunderheads, and will annoy anyone who has anything better to do. Some people enjoy arguing with idiots, and the media loves to report these arguments.

I am sorry to be wasting your time with this, but the line I quoted just irritated me to no end.

N1

Back around the time I got out of high school and the US was going to the moon, the Soviets were working on their own moon rocket. It never made it to orbit, though I imagine the attempts were pretty spectacular. I found this picture on Wikipedia and I think it looks like something right off the cover of Amazing Stories. It is more than 300 feet tall and weighs 3,000 tons. Wish I had a better picture to show you. Via Just An Earth Bound Misfit.

Update September 2016 replaced missing picture.

Queretaro

Pretty cool picture. Inside "La Cruz" Temple, Santiago de Queretaro, Mexico, via Burro Hall, via daring daughter.

Update February 2017 replaced missing picture.

Hawk

Second time I've seen a hawk in the swamp in back of the house. Don't know if it's the same one or even the same kind. This photo is a good example of why birders are second only to sports photographers in their consumption of high end optics.

Update February 2017 replaced missing picture.

Quote of the Day

From A Letter Of Introduction to The Onion's Our Dumb World, by T. Herman Zweibel. But your own copy from Amazon.

Alphabetical Order

When I am working a Jumble puzzle, after I have unscrambled the initial set of words, I will copy the circled letters to a space just below the space for the mystery phrase. I use a one to one order, one circled letter per space in the mystery phrase. This helps to insure that I have all the letters necessary for the phrase, i.e. I'm not missing any, and I don't have too many.

Sometimes the mystery phrase is obvious, and sometimes it's obscure. For the difficult ones I will sometimes recopy this set of letters and put them in alphabetical order. Today's puzzle was obscure, it was also really long, much longer than normal. So I thought I would make this alphabetical copy, and that's when I realized the letters were already in alphabetical order, and, Oh! Look! Alphabetical Order is the solution as well!

The sharp eyed will notice that the letters written into the space for the answer have a much lighter stroke weight than the others. This is because it was done with one of the those rolling writers, just touching the paper. They work just like ball pens when you use a firm pressure, but they will also write even if they are just barely touching the paper at all. Notice the tails on some of the letters in the initial set of words. Those happen when I lift off the paper while the pen is still in motion. I suspect I used a lighter pressure when I was writing the final answer because I was writing a long series of letters, and it saved time and/or motion. Using a heavier pressure would have involved pushing the paper down until it stopped, writing the letter, stopping, and then lifting the pen. Using a lighter pressure mean just lowering the pen until it contacted the paper and then writing the letter. Obviously requires a more sensitive touch. Does it save energy? Or does exacting that much control require more energy? Hmmm. Probably have to write a lot more on wavy newsprint to find out.

Update February 2017 replaced missing image.