Tuesday, June 1, 2010

CD Sad Face

So I recently watched a film called Zeitgeist which is really worth a watch, but I'm not going to say much about it in this blog today. Basically the film got me thinking about inaccuracies in religion and how in essence when massive periods of time elapse these inaccuracies are as hard to disprove as proving something that is true.  Zeitgeist devotes most of the first half of the movie suggesting that we have formed literal religions based of figurative myths. For example instead of Jesus being the sun of god he is actually representative of the Sun, a vital source of energy for the earth, and instead of him being executed on a cross and being resurrected three days later this is a description of a change between the summer solstice and the winter solstice whereby the sun seems to stay very close to the horizon or 'dies' for three days before it moves back up into the sky.

What boggled my mind was this idea that time is a very dangerous thing, the erosion of correct information leaves us with false information becoming fact and standing hard even if we are shown evidence to the contrary. The small relief that allowed me to maintain calm was that we as a society have managed to find a way to store information both efficiently and for thousands of years. Well so I thought.

This is where the title CD sad face came from, I recently read a study that strongly suggested that CDs are not going to store data for the thousands of years promised, in fact the average life span of a reasonably well protected CD was five to ten years and un-protected CD's were averaging a year. Now of course manufacturers everywhere got a little hot and bothered about the whole thing and said that this was only the cheaper brands, but further reasearch has suggested the brand-name writable CDs have just the same problem.

The Solution: The only one they seemed happy to support was that one should continually copy data onto new CDs every couple of years. Sound familiar? Somehow I can't seem to see how we are supposed to keep a well documented commentary of what's going on in today's world if we can't find a sufficient way of ensuring that information reaches the future untouched or unchanged. Maybe I've gone a little conspiracy theory on this one and I should just relax, but it would be interesting to see what the future is like if everyone in it has a detailed understand of the past, they do say one must learn from their mistakes right?

I have a fail safe, which I'm sure you are highly relieved to hear. I'm going to start carving things into gold. Apparently it is highly insulating, it lasts a long time and it will always remain valuable. Of course I have to worry that it will melt once global warming kicks in, and that it will be very expensive to procure, oh and it is really heavy and hard to inscribe. Ok so maybe not gold, I'll keep working on it.

Until then, watch the movie, it's all eye opening and what not. Plus it's free click here - yes I just embedded a link, I feel like a butterfly that just got out of its chrysalis.

xxx m xxx

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