I've always preferred the Star Trek model with a space ship with all of the published data in existence available for the universe of the crew to study for their own enlightenment and the sustenance of the ship. Not a bad model. Always have people to keep up the archive in the ship's computer.
REH -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer Sent: Monday, August 08, 2011 1:32 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] Re: Re: Bit Rot part II > Did you post this paper [1] in the earlier discussion? No. > My memory isn't what it should be. Ah, well, nor is mine. I was always a "cardboard box filing system" kind of guy and as the years went by, rooting though the cardboard boxes, book shelves, letter trays etc. for an elusive fact or recollection became burdensome. With a computer and a large HD it becomes easier. I maintain a rather simplistic database -- more like a digital cardboard box -- of things I think it likely I won't remember. I can never remember that word for guys who do the propaganda for whatever ideology. "Rhetoric" always comes to mind, but it's the wrong word. Ah, but in my idiosyncratic, easily scanned little database I have an entry for "rhetoric" that says, "Did you mean Polemicist?" My own little externalized mnemonic aid. I try to add to it regularly, each time I realize I'm blundering around looking, for the nth time, for a lost scrap of what I once knew. > Without adequate archives science is a failure. As long ago as the 80s, maybe earlier, I heard that in many cases it was easier to do some piece of research over again than it was to locate the the published papers that detailed completed studies. The net and large, fast databases may have offset that in the last 30 years but, OTOH, there's been an exponential (? I think) increase in published material. This problem has led to titles of papers that run to dozens of words. How is a physiologist to find a paper on protein conformation published by a biophysicist is relevant to his research on vestibular diffusion rates? Complexity catastrophe. See: Stuart Kauffman, 1993. The Origins of Order. New York, NY Oxford University Press. a difficult but enlightening book. People are applying his analyses/models to organizational management. The problem with finding knowledge -- e.g. existing research reports -- would, IMHO, be a candidate for just such an application. Easier and more entertaining than Kauffman is _A Canticle for Liebowitz_, a classic tale of rediscovering basic science in a post-apocalyptic not-so-terribly-remote future. - Mike [1] http://besser.tsoa.nyu.edu/howard/Papers/sfs-longevity.html -- 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
