Good points Mike, Did you post this paper in the earlier discussion? If you did, I apologize. My memory isn't what it should be. As to archive? Without adequate archives science is a failure. The rise of science (above the Scientific Religion of Shamanism) articulated it as one of the primal human systems of thought apart from religion and with its own universe. It was writing and Libraries that did that. It was still a part of religion in Galileo's time and the Mullahs shut it down when it got uppity in the 12th century in Islam. But the die was cast. Science is a cultural system along with the rest. Science needs a library that is stable in order to have a progression and a consensus. What has made this an age of Science has been the ability to maintain that archive. The Law side of Government is another that requires that archive. Surprisingly, Art is less vulnerable. There seems to be a genetic component of Art as a learning need. The current Art is like the current textbooks. In the future they will simply be sources of pleasure and a way of comprehending what our ancestors felt. Kazantzakis calls it "Dancing in Hades" with the bones of one's ancestors.
I am coming to the conclusion that there is an eighth system (called the "realm of the priest" in traditional religions). That is the systematic study of the filter of all of our impulses. The history. It may very well constitute either an eighth system of knowledge or it may be the glue that holds them all together. The "White Lotus." Either way, maintenance seems crucial if we are not to go the way of the other civilizations that were here probably millions of years ago and have left no trace. Our traditional history says there were seven. :>)) REH -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer Sent: Monday, August 08, 2011 2:20 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] Re: Bit Rot part II Here you go, Ray: > Sometime ago I wrote about bit rot....The problem is serious. And not new nor newly recognized. Here's a paper from 1999: http://besser.tsoa.nyu.edu/howard/Papers/sfs-longevity.html One factor (among many that Besser covers) is that many digital assets are not owned but "licensed". Personally, I reject this notion as total ohyyfuvg and treat what I have in the same way that I treat books. OTOH, I don't use (or have) Windoes or any related, putatively licensed software and I don't download movies or pop music. Nevertheless, it's a problem for institutional entities. So anyhow, Ray, what do you think we should do? Stuff rots, entropy rules. What should we preserve and how? Lots of old but classic film has flaked away to near or total unrestoreability. Nothing to do with digital. I'm not a proper cinephile but I've been quite taken with Kurosawa. But when I watched The Idiot, I didn't get it. It seemed not to match his usual quality. Then Wikipedia told me that the studio cut 99 minutes from the original 256. There is no extant copy of those minutes. Write on parchment, print on archival paper, cut in stone, analog-record on monel or stainless (is that possible?). When I finally got Linux up and running over a decade ago, I finally made a complete cut with CP/M. Anything that didn't get copied from 200K 5-1/4" floppies to Linux is gone along with the 8 Osborne I computers. I don't think it would be so easy now to abandon everything. I have hardcopy of all my CP/M-era correspondence. Not so 200M email archive -- just a periodic backup to another HD. And I've already lost something I kinda valued. I once wrote an implementation of W. Ross Ashby's "Homeostat" in XLisp with ASCII-graphics display. Not a big deal but, for me at least, a cool achievement. Seems to be gone. OTOH, I have tools -- real, analog steel tools -- I made 30 years or more ago. They serve as a sort of archive of how it was that I did some odd job, solved some unique problem. Kept just, y'know, in case that same problem should turn up again. I have such tools made before was born, some of which are forever mystery tools. Write on parchment, print on archival paper, cut in stone, analog-record on monel or stainless. Forge it in iron. Cast it in bronze. > Sometime ago I wrote about bit rot on the list and no one seemed to > have heard of it. So: heard of it. Not in a position to do much about it. Bruce Sterling, the archiving of whose papers apparently prompted the NYT article, has an I'm-out-of-here piece from 2008 on his Viridian project home page. http://www.viridiandesign.org/ I've only read that hastily but I gather that he's opted for what I might call an ephemeral life-style. Does an ephemeral life-style mean that the traces it leaves are themselves intrinsically transient and ephemeral? Will Bruce just let what he leaves behind bit-rot like smoke in an animated cartoon? Huh. I have paper copies -- some hardbound -- of his novels. But he's living (I gather) out of a suitcase or maybe just a small tote-bag. Shpx! Where does he put his anvil? Where does he grow his tomatoes? Much of what he says I can get with. OTOH, I have this feeling, my appreciation of his fiction notwithstanding, that he may have turned into a pathological technofetishist dork, otaku. He *did* contribute to an art piece of some kind (I haven't seen it) called "Embrace the Decay". Ephemeral. Look. I was never here. Is it supposed to be some other way? -- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~. /V\ [email protected] /( )\ http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
