[Beowulf] how Google warps your brain

Douglas Eadline deadline at eadline.org
Tue Oct 26 07:59:25 PDT 2010


<Seinfeld>
Not that there is anything wrong with that.
</Seinfeld >

>
> As usual, a highly insightful post from RGB.
>
>
>
>>  a) Multiple copies.  Passenger pigeons may be robust, but once the
> number of copies drops below a critical point, they are gone.  E. Coli
> we will always have
>> with us (possibly in a constantly changing form) because there are so
> very many copies, so very widely spread.
>
> I probably shouldn't mention Wikileaks here...
>
>>
>> At the moment, the internet has if anything VASTLY INCREASED a, b and
> c
>> for every single document in the public domain that has been ported
> to,
>> e.g. Project Gutenberg.
>>
>> Right now, I'm sitting on a cache of "Saint" books, by Leslie
> Charteris
>> (who was a great favorite of mine growing up and still is).
>>
>> Nobody is going to reprint the Saint stories.  They are a gay fantasy
>> from another time,
>
> Simon Templar? Gay? Cough.
>
> Next you will be telling me that there are gay undertones in Top Gun,
> the film with the sexiest astrophysicist ever.
>
>
>> might well last to the end of civilization.  Replicate them a few
>> million times, PERPETUATE them from generation to generation by
>> renewing
>> the copies, and backing them up, and recopying them in formats where
>> they are still useful.
>
> The cloud backup providers will be keeping copies of data on
> geographically spread sites.
> However, we should at this stage be asking what are the mechanisms for
> cloud storage companies
> for
> *) living wills - what happens when the company goes bust
>
> *) what are the strategies for migrating the data onto new storage
> formats
>
>
>>
>> Or, to put it differently, suppose every single human on the planet
> had
>> access to the modern equivalent of Diophantus's Arithmetica on their
>> computer, their Kindle, their Ipad
> I believe that was the original intent for the Web. Still under
> development!
>
>
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-- 
Doug

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