Wire you being so negative? The current joke got me amped up.
Wire you being so negative? The current joke got me amped up.
For media to endure, whether we’re talking years or millenia, you need to answer three questions:
The first is, perhaps, the easiest to answer, we have cave paintings from the stone age, velum and parchment that have lasted thousands of years, clay tablets that have similarly endured and various other historical artifacts that could be considered ‘media’. Alternatively, there are more modern techniques, such as etching into plates of non-coroding metal or other substances, or encoding in stable chemical structures such as DNA. Each approach has different benefits, but largely depends on the second question, where to store it?
Storing the media is the next question, and the answer is going to depend on both what media you’ve chosen and how long you want it to last. Somewhere dry, solid and geologically stable probably makes the most sense, but it also needs to be accessible to those you hope will find the information later. The Voyager disks are a good example of long term storage that will probably outlast the human race, but they’re not exactly handy to retrieve. The same goes for the various efforts to send archives to the moon; they’re more for posterity than use. Finding, or digging, a tunnel in a bedrock type mountain, far above current, or expected, sea levels is probably a good bet. Don’t forget to record how to find the repository, and find a way to keep that knowledge available. That could be a record in another repository, or maybe engineered into the landscape such that signs point to it.
The last question is how to encode the information. If you’re aiming to store the information for an extreme duration, you have to assume the entity finding it will have little or no cultural, technological or language connection with you. Pictures may work, we’ve learnt a lot from stone-age cave paintings and Egyptian tomb paintings, but they can only convey so much. For textual information you’re probably going to need multiple layers, the first being illustrated and readable without special equipment or techniques, and showing how to access the latter layers. The next layer should include information about how to read the rest of the layers (do you need magnification? If so, how do you do that? Have you included a lens that could be used? Do you need special illumination, or other techniques? How should the reader do that?), information about the language(s) used (perhaps a Rosetta Stone type artifact to help translate if they know any of the languages) and information about things like the units used (how long actually is a metre? What is a second?). The next layer would explain any envoding used for the rest of the information. If it’s binary stored as pits engraved in stone, or DNA base pairs, or holographically stored in metal plates, how do you extract the data, and how do you convert the naughts and ones to text for example. You must assume the entity processing this has no common base with you to work from, so everythis must be explained in detail. Finally you can store the information you actually wanted to store in the final layer.
These concerns hold whether you’re trying to store information for millenia or just a few decades. For instance, if I handed you an 8" floppy disk containing a Wordstar file, could you read it without more information? Even once you’ve found an appropriate drive (very rare now-a-days) and a machine that can use it (likewise) you need to hope the disk has been stored appropriately.
If you’re trying to store information to be accessible to humans over a timespan of no more than a few lifetimes you’ll probably be better served by arranging for it to be reencoded and tranferred to new, modern, media every few years.
I’m sure he could and would. All he’d need to do is dictate that X is the only payment provider all government departments may use to improve ‘efficiency’.
… and half the country is extremely enthusiastic about that.
There’s the reason nothing is done about it. It’s probably not actually half, but enough people didn’t speak up early enough, and so this has become the loudest voice in the room. Unless, and until that changes, the whole world is in for a rough ride.
Things I was not expecting to see first thing in the morning: number 1…
Do it as soon as possible, this is an opportunity that literally only comes around once per lifetime. Also, if she consents, try to record audio of her talking so that later generations can hear her and all the nuances of how she tells the stories.
Thank you for the time and energy you’ve put into making this instance what it is, I hope you can rest, recharge and start enjoying it with the rest of us.
Put the side back on your case, and then you don’t have to look at it. ;)
Be careful, that much antihol in one go won’t just get you sober, it’ll send you right out the other side. Few can deal with that clear a view of reality.
Further research shows that they blew everything up trying to deal with the ancient, insatiable, worms they released on themselves out of curiosity. Upon reflection, it is probably better that we didn’t arrive earlier.
We’ve got to leave something interesting for the alien xeno-archaeologists of the future to uncover.
I had not considered the concept of an army of bipedal, running, neurotoxin coated, suicide frogs, and now that I have, I intend to stay far away from amphibians, just in case. I still think they should each sport a set of human like teeth though, just to really drive the point home.
Kudos on ‘Kermitkaze’, that gave me a good chuckle.
The issue is you’d really need an evolutionary pressure for them to develop that attack behaviour. It could be defensive, but jumping on the thing you’re trying to fight off is a rather bold strategy, especially when the results aren’t instant. Alternatively, it could be an attack behaviour, allowing them to take down larger prey. Thus just leaves the issue of how the frog would consume its meal. They could probably evolve to swallow smaller prey, but the obvious adaption, which I think we’d see in this case, would be for the frogs to evolve teeth.
Sometimes their emotions have gone so far past reasonable that the first thing you need to do is bring them back to the point you can actually reason with them. After that, yes it’s really vital to take their emotions seriously, they need to understand them and trust that the people around them will take them seriously, but they also haven’t yet built the skills to moderate their own feelings, so sometimes you need to add those externally.
I was told that one way to help a young child break out of a tantrum is to ask them an odd question, something like “What color shoes are you wearing?” It does seem to work sometimes, usually by annoying them so much that they forget what they were upset about in the first place. I can well see it working for someone who needs to get out of a mental spiral.
I enjoy reading dead tree books as much as anyone, and whilest the publisher/distributor can’t take it away, there are plenty of ways you can lose access to them. Fire and flood being the two obvious ones, whereas digital books can be backed up offsite. It’s also easier to carry many books when they’re digital compared to physical.
For books I care about I try to get both a physical and a (drm free) digital copy for the best of both world.
You can also bake an entire lemon, peel, pith and all and it comes out sweet and tender. Wrap it tightly in foil so none of the juice escapes then bake until the whole thing is soft. It cooks well on the side of a BBQ too. Goes well with ice-cream.
You could say you just go round and round hunting for it, but no matter how hard you try you just can’t corner it.
Well, you could.
I’m notabot, ‘Hi!’.
So their standard hourly rate is $100, but for $75 more they’ll teach you how to do it? That might not be a bad deal, depending on the task, and how frequently you’ll need to do it in future. Even if you had to go to the super delux “do it while I watch” option to really get to grips with it, it might be worth it.