On the preservation of knowledge

The oldest multiple-page book is supposedly a golden Etruscan codex, dated to be about 2500 years old. The Etruscan language is lost, though there is hope of translation pending further discoveries. The Dead Sea Scrolls were written over 2000 years ago in Hebrew on parchment and papyrus. Inscriptions on stone walls and tablets date back much further, to the Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform script over 5000 years ago, and those remain mostly untranslated. What about today's knowledge? How well can it be preserved? There are three main problems with preservation: survival of the medium, retrieval of the data, and interpretation of the data.

How long will today's knowledge survive? Inscription on stone is still the best for longevity, but the storage capacity of rocks is quite low (1 KB per pound?). Magnetic media like hard drives have life expectancy of 20 years or so. Printed optical media like DVDs are suppose to last over 200 years, but much longer if preserved in the right environment. So far, optical media seemed like the most reliable mass storage option - no moving parts or volatile chemicals. There is a vault in arctic Norway that's designed to store plant seeds and preserve bio-diversity for thousands of years (it's funded in large parts by Bill Gates!). We can easily do the same for data. Imagine future archeologists uncovering this vault of treasures!

Some people have pointed out that the main problem with digitized data will be finding equipment that can read the data (computer drives, compatibility of file formats). I remember an episode of Cowboy Bebop where Spike risked his life to find a working video tape player in the forgotten bowels of a museum. I believe the problem of reading today's media is less significant than commonly regarded. Let's suppose that 2000 years in the future, people wish to access information from a Blu-ray disc that somehow survived. It's not unreasonable to assume that they will have technology to scan the binary data from the disc, even without the relic Blu-ray player. All that's needed is the right frequency of laser and sensitive mechanical control. Look at the example of ROM images today. You don't need a Nintendo 64 or Playstation to play old cartridge games. All the information on the physical cartridge can be uploaded as a file and played in a simulated platform - an emulator. We can assume that future technology will be more than adequate to recover information from any surviving digital medium.

What about interpreting the data? How can future historians build emulators of today's technology? Ultimately, it reduces to the problem of translation - one that historians and linguists are familiar with. Let's assume that people 2000 years in the future still use some form of English (as modern Greek is related to ancient Greek). The standard ASCII binary encoding for plain text is fairly easy to crack by modern cryptographic analysis. If we want to be completely obvious, the ASCII table is even short enough to engrave into stone (use synthetic diamond and it will last for hundreds of millenia). From there, we need to build and preserve a collection of plain English text documentation for every file format and programming method. This will be our Rosetta stone for the future. Start with the standard compression standards and codecs: zip, rar, jpeg, mpeg, pdf. These documentations allow future archivists to build a bridge toward data retrieval and translation. Currently, the organizations ISO and IEC publish technical specifications for all these standard formats. The same method of preservation can be done for computing platforms. If we archive the source code of an emulator, people in the year 4000 AD can rediscover the joys of Tetris.

To be continued...

Circular Reasoning: the Time-traveling Computer

From Wikipedia:

Let's suppose there is a computer that can communicate with itself both in the past and in the future. The computer calls up its future self:

Computer: [12:00] Hello there. What's the answer to this really tough problem?
Future Computer: [12:05] It's 16 widgets.
Computer: [12:01] Great, thank you! (Hangs up) Let me check if this is correct... Yes it is! (Phone rings)
Past Computer: [12:00] Hello there. What's the answer to this really tough problem?
Computer: [12:05] It's 16 widgets.
Past Computer: [12:01] Great, thank you!

How does Future Computer know the answer? Think about it!

Reducing Presentism to Solipsism

Presentism: the past is a memory; the future is a possibility; the present is the only reality. Objects in the past or the future do not actually exist; they are constructions in our minds. Let's suppose this theory of time is correct, and look at the example of the Sun. The sunlight that hits Earth is about 8 minutes old. When you look up during the day, you're not seeing the Sun; you're actually seeing photons that were created from reactions in the Sun 8 minutes ago. The Sun that you see exists in the past, and so according to presentism, it does not have objective reality. "But," you can ask, "does the Sun exist in the present?" There is no way to tell if the Sun exists in the present. You would know 8 minutes from now, if you still see it shining in the sky. But that's in the future, and mere speculation (a good bet though if you go by the laws of physics). Therefore, it is unknowable whether the Sun exists in the present. This explanation becomes obvious if we take the "light-cone" picture used in special relativity and remove the past and future light cones.

Since all of our interactions with external objects rely on signals that takes time to travel, we can extend the example of the Sun to everything we see, hear, or otherwise sense. Nothing at all can be known about the present except for what's at the origin, the observer: our own minds. And that's how the theory of presentism can be reduced, with a little help from physics, to the philosophical idea of solipsism.

No matter how far you run...

... you'll never get away from yourself.

System Shock and the art of writing in video games

When the history of my glory is written, your species shall only be a footnote to my magnificence. -SHODAN

This remark shows the essence of the incredibly rich characterization in the game System Shock 2. SHODAN is an egomaniacal and manipulative A.I. with a god complex. Look at the comparison she makes here: the millions of years of human evolution, all of humanity's history, civilization, technological and social development, all of it is utterly insignificant next to the magnificence of one being. It conjures the image of an epic narrative that sings praise of SHODAN's deeds, and the glossed-over footnote in extra-small font about her human creators. Not since the phrase "mostly harmless" has humanity been made to seemed so trivial. These words left an impression in my mind like a bolt of lightning burning its mark through a tree.

The game dives deeper to explore philosophical concepts. The Many, a biological collective that has been assimilating and zombifying the spaceship's crew, urges the protagonist to join them: "Do you not yearn to be free of the tyranny of the individual?" Of course, the phrase "tyranny of the individual" calls to mind a contrast to the familiar concept of "tyranny of the masses", which is often used as a criticism of democracy and majority rule. Here, the gamer knows exactly what this tyranny means. Individuals consider themselves unique, embracing the concepts of free-will, capable of making decisions and following their own moral imperative. But where do these concepts come from? Don't we believe that we have a right to control of our minds, our choices and decisions, just like tyrants and monarchs believe they have a God-given right to rule and control people? Why should we have that right? How can we claim that our minds belong only to us? These words pose a challenge to the very foundation of individualism, and question the philosophy that's been the fabric of Western society for centuries. Four words, in a videogame. Tyranny of the individual.

Why stop at philosophy when it can challenge the nature of art and aestheticism? The Many returns time and again to an image of a singing choir, using words like "harmony" and "chorus". Referring to all the zombie crew members, it offers this description: "they sing in our symphony of life." These words evoke Beethoven's 9th (also known as the Choral Symphony) or Hendel's Messiah, and the sublime beauty that these pieces represent. The Many compares the unity of minds to the unity of voices in a choir, the energy and pleasure that can bring. The moment in Ode to Joy when the individual voices fade out and the choir bursts into the chorus is an ecstatic experience, a revelation that washes over the listener's mind. As Diego, the ship's captain, glimpses at the power and the joy of being merged with the Many, he sings out "my cup runneth over." This overflowing sense of beauty and pleasure comes as stark contrast to the game's image of the Many and its manifestations. It is a tumor, a cancer that spreads and infects all that lives. Its creations are grotesque, perverted, monstrous. This convolution of beauty and grotesque adds to the unsettling atmosphere as the player travels through the innards of the Many.

There's much more to be said about the writing in System Shock 2, and I haven't even touched the storylines. But I want to leave with a beautiful line from another game, a very quotable one that I will write more about:

'There are no choices. Nothing but a straight line. The illusion comes afterwards, when you ask "Why me?" and "What if?" ... If you had done something differently, it wouldn't be you, it would be someone else looking back, asking a different set of questions.'

These are words that I keep coming back to, long after the experience of the game fades.

Microwaving a burrito

When microwaving a burrito, don't place it radially, like the hands of a clock. There are spots in a microwave oven that are cold - the microwaves destructively interfere there. If you put the burrito in the center of the spinning plate and look at the motion of the burrito, you'll see that the part in the center of the plate does not move at all, while the other parts of the burrito follow circular paths at different radii. Different parts of the burrito will get heated differently, some too hot, some cold.

The correct way is to put the burrito on the side of the spinning plate, so that it goes around the microwave like a kid on a carousel. That way, every part on the burrito travels through the same circular path, and it gets heated evenly.

Jewels

Tolkien once praised the phrase "cellar door" as one of the most beautiful sounds in the English language. While reviewing vocabulary for the GRE, I came across a few words that struck me as particularly beautiful:

Craven
Gossamer
Jabber
Nefarious

Some words, however, are just awful:

Pulchritude: (n) physical beauty.

I'm sure I'd be slapped if I ever tell a girl I find her pulchritudinous.