Chapter One of the Human Archive is in orbit…
by CJ | Feb 18, 2018 | Journal | 13 comments
13 Comments
Submit a Comment Cancel reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
I’m reminded of the big blocky thing in Larry Niven’s Footfall, or the thick, spinning metal discs in the 50’s movie version of The Time Machine by H.G. Wells.
Great idea, but why they chose “Arch,” which everyone will read as, “Arch” with a CH instead of “Ark” with the old Biblical associations, I don’t know. An .arc file is an archive, but looks like it means an arc, an arch, a curve, like a bow and arrow, or a sector arc of a circle or ellipse or…OK, I’m getting nerdy there. But an ark would have better recognition — in English usage, to Noah’s ark or the Ark of the Covenant, both containing sacred information, either a genetic / biological zoo storehouse onboard.a boat, or a container for sacred knowledge and communications. :: shrugs :: None of them quite work as a short form for an archive.
I sure wish news web sites would quit interleaving ads inside article text flows. I know they won’t, but it would be so, so much nicer if those were to the sides instead of cluttering up the article with useless noise, like the too-frequent, too-loud TV commercials.
While I noted they said each point encodes 6 bits, which is very, very weird by computer information storage standards. (8 bits being standard, 16, 32, and 64 being newer standards, 4 bits being quite old but standard for hexadecimal digits) Seems like they should’ve made a 5/4 larger pinpoint. ::shrugs::
But very interesting. So there could be a whole slew of those floating around in our Solar System or squirreled away on moons and asteroids for people or aliens to find in the future.
“Oh, look, it’s a hockey puck, a clear paperweight, with an intricate, carved center. Or production flaws. Oh. No, that’s data storage. Huh. Toss it in with the tennis balls and fuzzy dice, Zork-Blatz.”
Heh. — On the other hand, if a library of those is put aboard every starship as an Archive, like in certain books by certain authors (admittedly, a common SF idea) then you have a great set of keys for their survival. IF they have the microtechnology to see, scan, decode, and then use all that wealth of information.
On the third(!) hand, that gives any hostile or predatory opposing force the same handy set of keys to what makes Earth beings tick. — One can only go with the assumption that any alien species, if they recognize humans and Earth lifeforms at all as sentient, are about equally likely to be both friendly and hostile, perhaps at the same time and for their own alien reasons — which is no different than what humans would be like when faced with new (alien) lifeforms. Hmm, whether here on Jupiter’s and Saturn’s moons, or on exoplanets, “exomoons,” or hmm, nice floaty alien starships (UFO’s?). (I wonder how fast “exoplanet” will fall out of use. Probably as soon as we reach another star system or actually find evidence of life somewhere out there.)
Where would YOU “hide” a valuable Ark Disk? (See, I’d name them that, and never mind C vs. K.) (What, you like ArqDisq better? Oh, fine!) — Trunk (boot) or glove compartment? By the Tesla Roadster’s stereo or dashboard? Above the driver’s seat, tucked into the little flip-down visor shade? Since, after all, your object is for it to be found and not overlooked or thrown away, lost.
Oh, and yeah, I’m still reminded of the old Saturday Night Live skit of the last Star Trek (TOS) episode, where they meet an old Cadillac or whatever the car in space was, with the NBC execs…years before the Ferengi were ever dreamed up. (I wonder if that was one of the seeds of the idea for Gene or whoever came up with the Ferengi.)
Well, anyhoo, those quartz discs are a great idea.
Whoa — At random, iTunes’ came up with one of the Cosmos 80’s Carl Sagan tracks, reminding me of Voyager: The track is Alpha by Vangelis. Great, great stuff. When I was a kid, I loved the (ooh) vinyl record of the “Music of Cosmos,” and got the CD version and loved it for years. It has never been back in publication, nor available for download. They have this idea that you can get all the tracks elsewhere, so why bother? I sure wish it would be back in current publication and for download. If they could get the Voyager Record (music and info archive) available for people to buy too, heck, I’d buy it, if it wasn’t, er, astronomically expensive.
Yes, I’ll just go stand in the corner, after that pun. 😀
BCS, don’t know what your budget is, but you can get a copy of the contents of the Golden Record here:
http://www.ozmarecords.com/product/voyager-golden-record-book-2xcd
I expect that at some point it will be available as a digital download as well, but no idea where or when.
Music of Cosmos seems exorbitantly expensive if you want a CD set; used vinyl is much cheaper, but there’s the fiddly bit about owning a record player. If you do a Google search, you can find YouTube videos with the music, some of which can be burned to MP3, according to DH.
Ooh, that looks cool. Maybe next month. I’ve got a couple of extra payments due at the end of this month, or I’d do it now, just because.
I _might_ still have my old copy of the Music of Cosmos on CD, _if_ it made it through the move into the storage space. That’s among items to find. With a bit of luck, I’ll have a trip to my storage space this week or next, but no idea what among the great big 3D puzzle of boxes I will get to when. It will be a great surprise, whatever I do get to, haha. — I had tried to put the CD among things to keep, since I knew it had become prohibitively impossible for anyone without, you know, stacks of gold-pressed latinum lying around. (Hah, I used to have a working (vinyl) record player, but it finally honked out.)
I remember something about “binary coded decimal” crossing my brain in college, but essentially as a footnote type of aside in a lecture, probably by Dr. Dan Drew, and I’d thought it was about coding decimal digits directly into four bits, the other bits left over, so not “packed,” but as a quick-and-dirty simple thing. I do also recall him mentioning EBCDIC as predating ASCII, and Unicode had not yet been invented at the time of his lecture, which was, hmm, fall of ’84 or ’85, IIRC. … While in college on my first go-round, I missed an evening lecture on this thing called “hypertext,” which was supposed to revolutionize things. Heh, I don’t even recall who the guest lecturer was supposed to be. But dang, I wish I’d attended. (It skipped my mind or I had something to do I thought was more important. Man, those pebbles in the time-stream where you wonder if that yes-no decision would’ve changed your life-path.) — Dr. Drew retired the next semester, which I thought was very unfortunate, as I thought he was great. He was ex-Navy and an early computer scientist through-and-through, teaching freshman-level CSCI courses. A few years ago, I’d heard he’d passed away; RIP. I liked him both as a professor and a person. He was very down-to-earth, good people.
8-bit, “byte”, organization and 32-bit “words” didn’t enter the computer industry until 1964, in the 3rd generation (integrated circuit) IBM System 360 architecture, with its EBCDIC encoding. The 2nd generation was 6-bit BCD and 36-bit words, IBM 700(vacuum tube)/7000(transistorized) & 1400 families. At the time of the change there was huge controversy over it, with some DP shops declaring the would not now change, nor ever would “Buy IBM” in the future.
But in the 2nd generation era adoption rates were low. Computers were expensive to buy and to run. Only large organizations figured they could afford data processing. IBM had 10 confirmed initial orders for it’s 701, built and sold 19. Sold 123 of the upgraded 704. By the 1964 announcement of the 3rd generation System/360 computers they had orders for over 2,000 in 8 weeks! In 2 years it was producing 1,000 S/360’s a month! They were relatively cheaper and faster, and were all compatible in a family of models in a 50 to 1 performance range.
And thus the 8-bit encoding became a worldwide standard.
Sources: IBM, & personal recollection
@BCS, “While I noted they said each point encodes 6 bits, which is very, very weird by computer information storage standards.”
No, no, it’s not! It actually predates today’s 8-bit codes by decades–centuries in “computer years”. Would you believe going back to 1928? With 6 bits you can encode 64 symbols: 26 letters, 10 digits, several punctuations. It’s called Binary Coded Decimal, BCD.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCD_(character_encoding)
Aarrgh, I somehow pressed the wrong button in the tree and so my reply is above, instead of here where it ought to be. Apologies, nadi.
This morning’s hoarfrost
shimmers on the bridge planks.
Where are the koi?
– Peter Kendall, PDX-ARS
That’s just lovely, Paul.
It rained with thunder off and on here for the last 2 days, and according to the outside cats, it was all my fault. The back yard, once again, needs a goat.
We decided to go see the Black Panther movie today, and lo! All the theaters at our local googleplex are sold out, except for a sprinkling of solo seats. DH says he didn’t take into account a popular movie + kids off school today (Presidents’ Day). We may try to see it next weekend, or wait till it comes out on Netflix.
Thought it apt for herself.
This immediately made me think of Liu Cixin’s trilogy starting with the Hugo-winning “The Three Body Problem” which would make anyone rethink Earth’s relationship with the universe. And the wisdom of broadcasting our goodies to the other inhabitants of the dark forest.
While they’re not as easy to read as CJ’s – mainly due to Liu’s cultural background I suspect, and that of Chinese SF – I found all three worth the minor struggle, particularly the last 2. The series had a remarkable impact on my outlook on life, the universe and everything, which I thought was fairly sophisticated up till then.
That’s yet another recommendation for The Three Body Problem, and I have a huge backlog already of books to read or reread, but…that sounds good.
On first reading, I was puzzled but moved by Diane Duane’s The Wounded Sky, a Star Trek novel with the TOS cast / era. She has them encounter a being / force that exists or does not sense time in the linear sense we do, and the implications throughout the book really made me think then and on a reread. I’ve since reread it a few times, and still think it’s very good for that. It predates and may have influenced the different take that was used for the Bajoran Wormhole Aliens / Prophets for DS9, particularly the pilot episode. — Diane Duane’s book is available in ebook and used pb and hb from Amazon, and I think through her own site, or else a site of like-minded authors selling ebooks from the site. I could be confusing that with bookviewcafe.com and Vonda McIntyre’s books, available there as ebooks.
The haiku was great, Paul. (Shame on me, I should recall the slightly longer big sibling of the haiku, and now I’ll have to look it up.)
Workmen are supposed to be by today to do some repairs, two more needed and time-consuming; the others, just little quick stuff. I mopped the bathroom. It could be dry by the time any workers get here. If they do.
A package (a replacement lid which turned into both lid and pot, because I could not find just the lid, and it wasn’t too pricey) landed at the apartment office again. — But I might have that straightened out. Guess we’ll find out, as I have office supplies and a USB hub due today or tomorrow.
I don’t like my new-fangled self-wringing mop and little bucket without a wringer. Neither do the job well. Prices online for any bucket with wringer I found all seemed to be the huge industrial / campus / hotel sort of bucket and wringer, and therefore laughably pricey. All I need is a standard large-ish bucket with a wringer, which you used to be able to get easily. Sigh. Modern times. (my old mop and bucket either is still in the storage space hiding, or was “liberated” by the crew helping to pack and move. :-/ seems to be a recurring issue lately.)
So between that and sweeping, then mopping in a bathroom where there’s a litter box and two cats with no notion of keeping the litter in the box…. I feel I did an inadequate job of mopping, and told myself I’d mop more often. I’m not sure I believe myself lately, haha.
I am also unhappy with myself: I have not been studying Spanish (or French) (or Dutch) lately. And review I thought was sufficient, was not, I found out this morning, going over in my mind how to say things like, “Be careful, I just mopped the floor. It’s still wet.” I realized I hadn’t retained the words for “to mop”, “the floor”, or “wet”; or “to leak, leaking, a leak”, which thankfully was fixed a while back. Or “to drip”, which the faucet is doing. — My memory claims “the floor” is “la planche” in French, and further claims “la planchette” is a baseboard, or something like that. This would make the Spanish version something like, “la plancha” or “la planca”, only if they are cognate, which is no guarantee. Spanish and French vary a lot on what’s cognate and what’s a completely different root word. So I see I need to get my dictionary and do some lookups. And I am promising myself to spend an hour a night on language learning, until I’m satisfied I’m back up to my former fluency, and in Spanish, to build up basic vocabulary.
I can see that, on vocabulary I used to know, or related words, I will have to drill memorization better. Flash cards, maybe, over a period of days, to be sure. I’ve gone through and, “Oh, yeah, that’s what that was. I’ll remember that.” Then a few days or more later, nope, it didn’t stay in memory. (Note how I think I know the French words, but I’m no longer certain those are the right ones. I’m in the right neighborhood of the word-meanings, but not necessarily correct.) I keep running into this, when I try to come up with sentences independently, with vocabulary that might stretch my memory or knowledge. I also run into, I’ll remember some terms but not others. I’d thought I had kinship terms down solid again. No, I don’t. Almost, but not quite. So, more review.
I think I’m better on grammar, since Spanish and French grammar are very similar, with some notable differences. But their verb systems are broadly similar and their noun and adjectives work about the same, and…OK, prepositions are odd in French and easier in Spanish, usually. There are other things both do differently than English, and either about the same or else quite differently than each other. — I am still fuzzy and need to do a specific review on Spanish preterite and imperfect past tenses, because I keep getting unclear on the correct endings for these, both for regular and irregular verbs. I know most of it for the -ar verbs, but somehow, I keep thinking it does something else for the -er/-ir verbs, which don’t actually differ much, except in the nosotros and vosotros stem vowels (e versus I is often the only difference, with the other endings equal, just not throughout every tense and mood).
LOL, sorry, I just went on a tangent only a Spanish student or teacher could like, haha.