On Sun, 2013-09-01 at 08:39 -0700, Thejaswi Udupa wrote: > Ted Chiang's new story touches upon some of these aspects -- > > http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2013/the_truth_of_fact_the_truth_of_feeling_by_ted_chiang
Well what the heck? I recently wrote an article for my medical college alumni website. Let me simply cross pot it here since it seems to deal with technology and information. FORMAT FALOODA I was recently reading a lot about languages and tried to dig into why it was claimed that the Vedas represent the oldest language preserved as it was spoken several millennia ago. My quest was for a date and I do not want to get into that discussion here. But apparently no one in India was actually interested in how old the Vedas were in years or centuries or millennia. "Very old" was good enough. But the "proof" that a very old language had been preserved came from the observation that the chanting of the Rig Veda in different institutions all over India hardly differed by even a syllable, leading to the conclusion that an old language had been kept alive by oral transmission. Of course anyone who studies the Veda formally will tell you the exact algorithm that is used for accurate transmission. It is well known But this is not about the Vedas, it is about transmission of information. Until I was 15 years old, text was in books. Photographs were on paper. Sound was preserved on gramophone records. And moving pictures were recorded on celluloid films that simply preserved thousands of individual photographs. By the time I turned 30, a new format for recording had become commonplace - magnetic tape. Sounds, and video could be stored on magnetic tape. Photographs however continued to be either on paper or celluloid film. And text was still paper. But since I turned 30, the world has turned upside down. "Digital storage" was invented and text, data, photographs, sound and moving pictures were all stored as digital data. By this time I had a collection of about 2000 still photos (after discarding the useless repeats), 1000 "slides" (transparencies), about 200 cassette tapes and 150 hours of VHS (PAL) video. Mind you - in the late 1980s and early 1990s "digital" was all very primitive. Computers barely had the processing power to display an image and I recall a time when my Intel 80286 computer (1 mb RAM, 80 mb hard disk) took a minute to load and display an image in the strange new format "jpeg". By the early 1990s I had gone off still photography and was into videography and my greatest disappointment was the discovery that affordable computers just did not have the processing power or memory for anything more than a few seconds of video. But the entire world was muddling through. Images were in that timeless format. jpeg and gif. Also pcx and bmp. Text was stored in text files, or in new formats like doc (Microsoft), wps (Microsoft) and one more famous format whose name I can't recall now. Data was stored in "dBase" files. Sound was stored in humongous wav files and later in mp3s. Video was just coming into the picture. Mpeg was just there as mpeg 1. Microsoft's avi was a competitor. So what did I do? I started storing my photos as jpegs, scanning them initially with a hand held scanner and later with a flatbed. Once processing power increased and storage space increased I converted all my video into VCDs (mpeg 1). By then videos and cameras had moved to DVD (mpeg 2) and I dutifully moved myself to mpeg 2. I would leave a playing cassette tape connected to the computer and go to bed - one side every night for hundreds of nights, converting all my tapes into mp3. I would spend a couple of hours a week scanning all my transparencies with a transparency scanner until all that was digital too. This was in the days before external hard drives, solid state drives and cloud storage. But I had CDs and DVDs and I stored everything away in that format. Still, nothing stood still. Processing power increased. Photo and video resolution improved as more storage space became available. I transferred all my CD/DVD data, photos, videos, books, music on to external back up drives - which was by now a relatively trivial job. Now I look back and look at one blue 1 terabyte disk, and a black jacketed 500 Gb disk that has everything I have collected and I wonder what's the use? I find that I am unable to access old database files of my early days where I used to record every endoscopy I did. I have to do a backward somersault to try and access that old data. Old format text files are sometimes inaccessible as the programs are obsolete. Oh, of course I am a very smart guy. I know exactly how to hack into those files and find what's in them. But in a few decades, when I am dead, anything remotely useful in those disks is likely to be trash, e-trash that is. Somehow, the jpeg format has survived, although old photos do not have the resolution or color of modern digital photos. And mp3 has survived. But the codecs to run old mpeg files and old avi files are gradually disappearing. Already old format database files are obsolete. So what is the real point is storing up data like this? Some of it does not last even one generation. Either the format or the medium becomes obsolete. The internet and computers, while making everything compact and everything accessible to everyone has actually decreased the long term safety and accessibility of information. Survival for even 10 years is not guaranteed. I have so much physical information about my grandfather. I wonder how much information we will pass on to grandchildren if we store it all up in digital format? That actually takes me back to the Vedas and the means used to preserve their fidelity. I think one simple thing was understood all those years ago. Information is meaningless unless there is continuing transmission from human to human. If humans go the information becomes useless, but separating humans from information and putting a wall of any type that stops access is a formula for losing that Information. The system is similar to genes. Simply getting the genetic code of the mammoth is insufficient to create an ecosystem for a mammoth community, even if a mammoth were somehow cloned. Genes and information (aptly called "memes" by Richard Dawkins) are similar. Medical textbooks are worthless without teachers to pass information on to students. The last 30 years have seen such a huge revolution in information storage and transmission that the new format is replacing everything else that existed. In the long term this may be an error. Information stored digitally is being lost even today as people forget old formats and move on to new formats. Memoirs, photographs, videos, letter and papers written by millions of people will be lost as surely as they have been in the past with little chance of retrieval. I am not sure if there is a solution although I think that talking, singing, drawing and storytelling must continue because those formats are the only information transmission formats that go from human to human directly without conversion or special skills or equipment. And writing - writing in alphabet. That too is a skill that is going to need special preservation. Losing all that would be a serious loss to humanity because I do not see electronic digital storage in endlessly changing "It's me today" formats as convenient or fail safe in the face of the worst human disasters that nature is prone to throw at humans. just sayin'..
