On Tue, 2014-01-07 at 20:20 -0800, Tim Bray wrote: > > https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/10/06/Edmonton#p-3 > The conundrum at the end is apt.
I think e-text sharing gives more people access to written texts than ever before, and I do believe that scientific journals should all be electronic, to be printed if needed. But none of this takes away the problem of obsolescence and "fragility", if you like, of electronic information. The lay press is full of little titbits of information that are linked up. One news item says that the US's NSA is working on "quantum" computing (whatever that means) that will make every code easily breakable. Another news item says that Russia is switching to typewriters and notes being physically passed to others to maintain secrecy. > The oldest Greek text available - pottery shards with Mycenaean Greek that are thought to be about 3500 years old came from an era when only a few special scribes could write. People who have analysed the trilingual texts at Behistun in Iran say that little differences in style indicate that there was more than one scribe who worked on etching the symbols. Other random news suggests that people are forgetting how to write - and we may well be getting back to an era when writing on physical media (like paper) will become a specialized skill known only to a few. That could well mean that humans have passed the "peak" in terms of written records that can survive for millennia. From now on less and less will survive because the formats are less accessible without several layers of human intervention to produce the equipment to access e-information. ..just a random ramble to be taken FWIW shiv
