Re: Representing futuristic English


Neil Barnes wrote:
> On Thu, 25 Aug 2005 12:36:42 -0700, Constantinople wrote:
>
>
> > Neil Barnes wrote:
> >> On Thu, 25 Aug 2005 07:41:15 +0000, Kevin wrote:
> ...
> >> But it's no more accessible to a future society starting from scratch
> >> than in the ipoodle format. Really, nothing audio has been
> >> futureproofed since the wiggly-groove record.
> >
> > The point about "starting from scratch" wasn't in the original question,
> > unless I missed it. We tend to imagine for some reason that in the
> > future technology will collapse and people will literally have to start
> > from zero and therefore that "futureproofing" will therefore have to
> > take this into account. While civilizations collapse, in human history
> > technology has not gone to zero; each generation has built on the
> > accomplishments of previous generations. The idea of Atlantis is an
> > example of advanced technology being irretrievably lost, but back in the
> > real world while I'm sure some technology has been lost, I can't think
> > of any complete collapse without preservation. The closest I can come to
> > a significant loss of knowledge is the burning of the library at
> > Alexandria and the loss of the knowledge contained therein, but I
> > imagine most of that was not technological, and as with Atlantis,
> > imagination probably outstrips reality in certain respects. In short,
> > technological knowledge has not repeatedly fallen to zero with the
> > collapse of civilizations. The collapse of a civilization does not mean
> > the irretrievable loss of high technology.
>
> No, I appreciate that this wasn't the original question; I conflated
> something from another thread. However, the point still remains.
>
> Another BBC example: back in the, um, eighties, there was a large project
> to produce a modern doomsday book. It was burnt onto laserdiscs - at the
> time, thought to be the most robust data storage available. Snag is,
> nothing these days can read them.

Think about punch cards for a second. You know, this:

http://www.answers.com/main/content/img/CDE/_PUNCHCD.GIF

Point is, there are not working punch card readers. OK< there may be,
but assume there aren't. I dare say that we could rig up a feeding
scanner to read a stack of these in. If we cared to. I don't think it
would be that hard.

We're not at that point today, but I imagine that before too long we
will get to the point where we can do the same for this old videodisk.
I.e., put it under some scanner-like device and read it in. If we cared
to.

> The BBC - as far as I know - still
> maintains a couple of readers and BBC Micros (UK readers will remember
> them) specifically so they can be read, and a project is managing the
> transfer of that data.
>
> At the time, readers were easily (if expensively) available, and BBC
> Micros were piled hip deep; hundreds of thousands were produced. But the
> technology was replaced, and what it was replaced with wasn't compatible.
> Equally, the BBC has a huge library - still - of 2" video tape, but only
> one machine that can still read them.
>
> The problem is not knowing that the data is there - though even
> recognising the data may be tricky - or even knowing how to get it off the
> medium, but having the economic drivers to develop the specialist hardware
> and software to do it.
>
> A human readable medium - carved stone, fired clay, silver/gold/platinum
> halide images, carbon ink on animal skin or plant-fibre paper, is known to
> last for hundreds and in some cases thousands of years. These days we're
> finding 'eternal' CDs that are having bit-rot after five or ten years; and
> with many modern CDs it's deliberately difficult (intended to be
> impossible) to read the data in its native form.

OK, the rotting of data is a separate issue. That probably needs to be
taken care of on the production end. I think the eternity of CDs was
more a popular myth than a serious claim that the finest minds believed
in. I remember the popular myth. It included that you could abuse CDs
and they would take the abuse. I imagine that the basis of this myth is
the deep contrast between the fairly but not super-robust CD, and the
extremely delicatae vinyl LP.

> The point, I suppose, is that technology doesn't disappear, but it drifts.
> And you never know where it's going to drift to, and what is going to
> become impossible to do.

We've had technology for all of human history. I daresay the technology
of the past is not inaccessible to us. Starting as recently as
punchcards. Nobody or almost nobody has an vinyl record player any
more, but if we cared to, we could read the stuff on it. Put together a
record player. You mentioned human readability. Vinyl LPs are not human
readable. But if we wanted to, we could read them, even if we didn't
have record players still around. A school kid could probably put
together a record player as a science project.

Deterioration is of course an issue. However, as it happens my vision
of the future is one in which we keep transcribing what we have to new
media, same as we kept transcribing the classics of antiquity, so that
even if the originals are deteriorated we still have copies.

.

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