Obligatory biologists links: all hail to our fungal overlords!
http://www.nature.com/news/2001/010627/full/news010628-11.html
While I am at it, I can recommend the excellent What the Fuck, Evolution? Tumblr.
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But…but, the future is going to have magical technology, according to transhumanists. If they can resurrect frozen corpses in the glorious future utopia, surely reading a degraded CD-ROM can’t be outside their reach.
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Yeah; I certainly don’t begrudge Team Analog their hobby; and given that ‘art’ is generally something we do either because it produces favorable affective experiences in the artist, in the audience, or both; it’d be both futile and a rather foolish misunderstanding for me to go on about the archival virtues of digital and how no, really, I’m pretty sure that information theory proves that we can capture your precious detail, etc. to people who find that part of the music experience is just captured better on vinyl, or mix tapes, or whatever; I just tend to find my skepticism eyebrow twitching when anyone goes beyond the "Frankly, I like analog better; and I’d rather have degraded-but-human-readable results from the shoebox full of 4x6 prints my dead relative stashed in the attic 40 years ago and I discovered yesterday than have nothing; but theoretically could have had something if my family had just had a competent archivist on staff with digital media(which is a serious consideration for serendipitous discoveries of old stuff; mass market digital media is usually optimized for price and capacity; at which it is very good; but has pretty high odds of retaining nothing of use if neglected for too long; while analog media have pitiful density and simply cannot be nondestructively copied; but your odds of getting something meaningful after a few decades of neglect(occasionally centuries, for specific analog media that happened to be overqualified in that regard) are much better); and into the 'digital is all ephemeral and vulnerable; man! stuff.
(Plus, even if it isn’t a techie slapfight; there’s the minor fact that Life As We Know It is heavily dependent on the digital(but not binary) attributes of using DNA for storage; and being able to do error correction and relatively low-error replication as often as the situation requires; and that even what we think of as ‘analog’ media, like older books, most classical statues, etc. have only survived because people pumped out a bunch of copies to the best of their ability and not quite all of them were destroyed. When the activity in my skepticism eyebrow becomes too much to bear; I usually end up suggesting that, if analog is so wonderful, how about they read up on the (fascinating; but rather nightmarish for the people trying to do it) tribulations of constructing and maintaining The International Prototype of the Kilogram and it’s high-accuracy copies for national standards organizations and such; or the similar story that existed around the meter before it was given a definition based on physical constants. If you think verifying your backups sucks; just try keeping the masses of a bunch of platinum-iridium lumps in precise agreement with one another despite real-world interference; and then come crawling back; begging to be allowed to use checksums and hashses again…)
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I do keep my most critical personal data on Verbatim gold DVD-R discs. That’s actually why I had that link. Over ten years ago it occurred to me that discs had to have a shelf life, and I wanted to develop my own routine for keeping them up to date. So in seven years (if we’re still here) I plan to make new disc back-ups, 20 years after the originals. But those are really only a tertiary back-up. I have both disc and SSD backups in my home safe here in Texas and in two other safes on opposite sides of the country. I update the home safe back-ups twice a year and the remote back-ups at least once a year. Then there are the two Corsair Survivor flash drives I use for local back-up, one once a week that travels with me and the other monthly that also stays in my home safe. My Red Hat home server also runs two SSDs in RAID 1 and my laptop performs automatic back-ups to it.
All media is kept in dry cool unlit places. I don’t pretend that I can defeat entropy, but I can fight it and minimize my own data’s error rate at least as long as I’m alive.
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Your faith and zeal are commendable, my child. Though given a lot of what you people waste their time storing on CD-Rs; devouring them is really just an extension of our mandate, as decomposers, to keep the carbon cycle moving and prevent the world from being buried in leaf litter and similar worthless trash.
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Oooh, where’s that from?
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The Time Machine?
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Disc rot is nothing new, as anybody that was a laserdisc enthusiast can attest to.
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Our Fungi who art in soil, water, and heavens
Hallowed be Thy name.
Thy mycelium will come.
Thy will be fruiting on earth, as thy spores art in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
And forgive us our anti-moulding agents.
As we forgive those who whiterot against us.
And lead us into fermentation,
But deliver us from fuselol.
For Thine is the third kingdom,
Though you are not monophyletic,
Forever,
Hymenia
From the linked paper:
Aluminium recovery from CDs is economically unattractive and energy consuming, because the amount of this metal is very small (a few grams per tonne of discs). However, recycling of poly(bisphenol A carbonate) is economically valuable and this process includes removal of the coatings from this polymer. There is a variety of chemical and mechanical methods for CD recycling (e.g. chemical recovery, melt filtration, and mechanical abrasion) but each technique has some disadvantages in terms of environment or energy (Zevenhoven & Saeed, 2002). The ability of this fungus to remove aluminium, lacquer, and printing could provide an environmental-friendly alternative for its application in the stage of separation of coatings from the polycarbonate polymer.
During my studies, some friends of mine took enormous pleasure in rubbing in that fungi basically broke all records. They still love tardigades, too, but if they had any argument with anybody about “who would win” (e.g., survive), it always would end up with recitals about fungi.
Needless to say they were quite impressed by anthropological hypotheses that the recent evolutionary development of the human brain in regards to creativity could have been influenced by fungal psychotropics.
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I will build a RAID5 home server for storing my shit, with encrypted backups (diff-based) in storage and on the cloud. It will be awesome. If I write scripts or tools to do it, I will release it as open source.
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Yup, the 1960 film version (best of the three, IMNSHO)…
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Heh. Funny, but true. IMO, this is a new golden age for music lovers. Maybe not audiophiles (who are all weirdos) but for people that like to have a decent home stereo system and love technology AND the fun of the old days of vinyl, this is great. The CD is dead - rightly so - and I learned that quick when I tried to give away our 400 disk collection. No one wanted them.
I already ripped everything I wanted to keep. I’ve not bought a CD since I can remember. If I want something physical or to get something old and hard/impossible to find digital, I’ll get it on vinyl.
And my old Cerwin Vega speakers I bought in 1987 are still going strong. Though they needed the foam surrounds replaced a few years back.
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looks at paperbacks from the 60s
looks at rack of obscure music CDs
starts sweating
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I will stop buying CDs when I can easily buy FLACs of what I want. Some of the more obscure CDs I have bought recently were near impossible to get any other way (not even as MP3s).
Until that happens, I will buy a CD, rip and encode it, then put it away for storage.
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My first edition of Chaucer has deteriorated badly.
“And bathed every veyne in swych licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour” and
“Or as an ook comth of a litel spir”
See? Many words are completely unreadable.
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I have my grandfather’s Boy’s Own Papers circa 1890. They were printed cheaply on newsprint, and many of the pages are starting to look like your gif.
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215 petabytes of data on a single gram of DNA. Just don’t drop the vial. The podcast is fascinating.
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Nah - that’s just Chaucer’s encryption.
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It shouldn’t be hard to break. The biggest prime numbers back then were like, what? Two digits?
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He stored the key in his mind palace
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