All good. I have a bunch of old NBS Circulars that I ought to do the same with. But for longevity, there's no substitute for carefully-stored paper/parchment/papyrus.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 http://electrooptical.net http://hobbs-eo.com
Try the free version and let us know your impressions.
-- Science teaches us to trust. - sw
We recently had a rather large brush fire in the area.
1,490 structures were destroyed. Among them was the home of a friend that had spent the last 10 years since his retirement scanning his books, notes, and personal papers. Thanks to my insistence, his financial documents, password lists, digital photos, digital movies, and difficult to find ancient software were all copied and deposited at various relatives homes. However, the paper library, all the computers, and all the magnetic and solid state media, were destroyed.Lessons learned by the fire:
As for careful storage, one local resident lost all his papers stored in a fire safe when he forgot to close and lock the safe door before evacuating. He had no idea that the fire safe only functioned with the door closed. I also had to explain that opening the door while the safe is still warm is a really bad idea for anything flammable inside. My paper book collection is much too large for any fireproof safe that I can afford but my computer backups and digital archives fit nicely incide.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
I doubt you are going to find Ohm's Law written on papyrus.
Paper is not searchable. PDF-Xchange does OCR, annotation, and is text searchable.
You can zoom in for more detail. With paper, you need a magnifying glass.
You can easily send a copy to someone in PDF. You have to mail paper.
All the files on your site are in PDF. Nobody would want paper versions.
Google Patents are in PDF. Nobody is going to convert them to another format, such as DJV, so PDF is going to be around for a long time.
I have 510,016 files in PDF on my hard drive, mostly datasheets and technical articles. I could not possibly find enough room to store paper versions.
I can easily copy my hard drive to another drive for backup. I can make multiple copies and save them in different places for security.
PDF copies are identical to the original. Paper copies can have defects.
Paper versions would present a severe fire risk. Copying to another backup set would cost a fortune and take forever.
Skip paper. Keep your files in PDF.
-- Science teaches us to trust. - sw
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y.com/.. They'll scan them, and they do a *great job* of it. (See
a very useful feature, and easier than the manual use of the Index. Plus, w ith e-search you can find stuff that isn't even in the index. I searched my scan of Motchenbacher and Fitchen for "roller coaster effect" -- it wasn't in the index, but I immediately got it with search and stepped through the different "finds" with ease.
reading books on the computer. But I like the PDFs too. I can take the PDF with me on travel. I can't do much of that with paper.
lington's 1939 paper "Synthesis of Reactance 4-poles." This little Bell pam phlet is on acid paper, very yellowed, and is very fragile. It also seems t o be rare in any form. So I scanned-in the whole thing at either 300 or 400 dpi BW. I then cleaned up my scan work further with Paperport, and also co pied the 6x9 pages onto 8.5x11 pages (also with Paperport). (I need to re-d o the centering--I have a better method now, but it is good enough as-is.) Then I printed it double-sided with a laser printer, comb-bound it, and it came out pretty nice. I mean, the laser printer smoothed out most all of th e pixelation that can be seen on screen, but even that is not bad. It is as good as a decent "print on demand."
he margins, as the margins are now nice and wide... kind of like legal cour t decisions. (I have speculated that the reason for wide margins in court d ecisions was exactly for the purpose of those who come later to make their own notes. But what do I know? It is just my guess.) If I mess a page up, I can reprint it and then re-insert it into the comb. The PDF is searchable, of course.
I had forwarded the Darlington paper I scanned to David Gleason some time a go. He has posted it:
Y'all can look and judge. I think I did a decent job.
It's funny Darlington is remembered for the transistor. This synthesis work was way more important, and really amazing.
There is an interview with David Gleason here:
I have been thinking about a solution that lasts. It is called caesarcrypt encoding. A document-- any document -- consists of glyph's, literally think about hieroglyphs, Chines, Korean Cyrillic or just plain Roman. Use 0 1 2 3 as word line paragraph section and chapter separations. Other bytes encode identical glyphs. Leave it to the reader to find out what language and based on the language the encoding and the representation of character. This can be automatic, or manual.
After millions of years an alien civilisation would be able to decipher our books. If they are like the dead sea scrolls, large parts missing, the remainder should still be decipherable.
Tehcnical books from before WWI are very valuable and should be kept. The Dutch Forth chapter has the bad experience about books donated to a library, then thrown away by them.
Groetjes Albert
-- This is the first day of the end of your life. It may not kill you, but it does make your weaker. If you can't beat them, too bad. albert@spe&ar&c.xs4all.nl &=n http://home.hccnet.nl/a.w.m.van.der.horst
This is where links and symbolic links come in handy. Have an url directory where hard links are named after there url. Never change the original filename, but link them into a hierarchy of subjects and give the best name you can find.
Doing a project, link all relevant files temporarily to the directory where the project resides.
Groetjes Albert
-- This is the first day of the end of your life. It may not kill you, but it does make your weaker. If you can't beat them, too bad. albert@spe&ar&c.xs4all.nl &=n http://home.hccnet.nl/a.w.m.van.der.horst
[Snip]
Electronic storage media get obsolete very quickly. Anything archived on those will be lost in one or two decennia, unless it gets copied onto new media from time to time.
How to store information for longer than one or two millennia is an interesting problem. Not only do you need to conserve the media, but also scripts and languages change enough to become unintelligible.
The Rosetta stone did a fair job. Maybe we could laser-etch our valuable data inside thick glass slabs in three or four languages and multiple different scripts. Also, pictures are worth a thousand words.
On scales of millions of years, everything is plastic, soluble or friable, so there is no hope to conserve anything that long.
Jeroen Belleman
As happens with anything anybody finds interesting. The Epic of Gigamesh has been around for a while, and Homer's epic about the Trojan war seems to have lasted just as well.
unintelligible.
As long as the information is in use, this isn't a problem.
H Beam Piper - in his short story "Omnilingual" - pointed out that once you've got physical science, some of the problems become rather less difficult. I read it when it was first published in 1957, and I still like it.
If you can recognise what is being depicted. H Beam Piper's point was that some relationships are more fundamental than others
Except for the bones of an occasional dinosaur. In the right sort of silt, you can pick out the soft tissues and the feathers as well. The Burgess Shale deposits have last some 500 million years.
Not everything is all that plastic, soluble or friable.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
The conservation of bytes is a different issue. It could be pits in a gold plate. But do not use a format that is more complicated than what I suggest. E.g. cd's are worthless with all their error correcting stuff. The only solution is having redundant copies (dozens of them) on a cd.
The modern trend is to trade reliability of data by sophisticated processing. That will not age well. What ages well is simplicity. I have 90 kbyte floppies of the Osborne, that I can read still. Detail, they are worn to the point that you can "see through them". That is the direction to take for knowledge to survive this civilisation or for that matter humanity.
Groetjes Albert
-- This is the first day of the end of your life. It may not kill you, but it does make your weaker. If you can't beat them, too bad. albert@spe&ar&c.xs4all.nl &=n http://home.hccnet.nl/a.w.m.van.der.horst
Paleontologists would beg to differ.
It's not the only solution. Compact disks are designed to be written - and read - quickly and cheaply. If you wanted to archive material for a long ti me, you'd make different choices.
ing. That will not age well. What ages well is simplicity.
Nobody seems to be trying to archive anything for any length of time. If th ere was a requirement to do this, we'd have to develop the appropriate tech nology (which wouldn't be all that difficult).
But why would you bother?
or for that matter humanity.
Our "knowledge" is what we are interested in. Preserving stuff of the benef it of the next civilisation involves second-guessing what they'd be interes ted in, which we are in no position to predict.
Our interest is in preserving our own civlisation, and preserving detailed historical records (like a complete collection of Trump's tweets) isn't wh ere we need to concentrate our attention. Our civilsation isn't going to fa ll apart because we can't read old CD's. There are more immediate threats (like Trump's tweets).
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
The New York Times went through this in the runup to Y2k, where they created a time capsule intended to be opened in 3000 AD.
What the NYT ended up with was a modern mix of Rosetta Stone (words in multiple languages chiseled into stone) and The Dead Sea Scrolls (engraved into copper): electron-beam engraved nickel sheets, contained is a welded stainless stell sculpture.
.
Well, stones do survive. As do isotopes. Not that one can read the words though.
Joe Gwinn
And what do the bytes mean? How do you think an alien civilization will figure that out?
Jeroen Belleman
Aside from historians (who failed to TRACK history as it was happening) and "The Dark Ages" events, I suspect there is little practical interest in things more than a few decades old.
I'm more dismayed as to how many holes are "re-dug" because information is either *hidden* (corporate secrets) or carelessly discarded (businesses who abandon products or go bellyup).
How much effort is expended reinventing the *same* wheels?
I've explained that. Every byte means the same. From that point on a clever civilisation can find things out.
-- This is the first day of the end of your life. It may not kill you, but it does make your weaker. If you can't beat them, too bad. albert@spe&ar&c.xs4all.nl &=n http://home.hccnet.nl/a.w.m.van.der.horst
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