Back from the Future
Let's say, all human civilization were abruptly destroyed tomorrow. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe in a thousand years, or maybe in a million. Maybe by Vogon constructor fleets, maybe by an asteroid, or maybe our own doing, such as a fatal side-effect of global warming. This isn't very unlikely, mind you, because a large part of a very interesting culture was almost wiped out by hurricane Katrina in the not-too-distant past, and I'm talking centuries into the future.
It would be arrogant of us to proclaim, today, that the artifacts of our age will survive indefinitely, so I'm thinking that there will be a time when all of our culture will be wiped out too. But presumably, life will continue ("Life finds a way." -Dr. Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park.) I would trust the inhabitants of our space stations to re-colonize the earth if Darwinian forces do not, so let's just continue with this for the sake of argument. Now, what will archaeologists of that age discover about us when they look back?
When we look back today at the Tomb of Tutankhamun, or the Incan ruins at Machu Picchu, at the Nazcan lines, or at the elaborate city planning evident in the lost cities of Mohenjo Daro or Harappa, we draw our conclusions based on what we see. We see richly-decorated mummies, ultra-large-scale surface drawings that are only visible from the skies, or urban artifacts that we notice because of similarities to our own culture. All in all, whatever we glean from these past cultures is because of the intense visual similarities with what we see in today's world.
But will today's world bear any similarity to the world that will come millenia from now? Think about this a moment: today, so much of our "civilization" is defined by the information we have created. Information that every single soul on this planet creates, unknowingly, unwittingly, relentlessly, every moment of their lives. Will our descendants be able to decode this all? Think about how much a simple piece of information is encoded.
Let's pick this very blog as an example (and I get a little technical here, so please bear with me - it's relevant to the point I want to make.) To be able to read this blog, you must first know English. That language itself codifies so much meaning, so I can use building blocks called 'words' without having to explain the meaning behind each. I use words as a layer of abstraction over meanings and concepts.
Then there are the obvious technological features: if an alien being were to understand my blog, he/she/it would need to locate it from the alternating pattern of 1s and 0s in magnetic form from the platter of a hard-disk by feeding it the right combination of electrical signals, encode the stream into ASCII (or lately, Unicode), understand HTML, and finally ascribe meaning to it using a language which we call English. Compare this with hieroglyphics etched on a wall, many of which are pictures, not text, that a later civilization has been able to (at least partially successfully) interpret.
So, my question is, how much of today's information would tomorrow's a later millenium's civilization be able to decode? Couple that with hard numbers: every time I take a digital photograph, I am creating millions of bits of information. There are billions like me, taking billions of such pictures per nanosecond. By making information easy to create, we have empowered a whole generation to keep creating information with no limits, no boundaries. Old information does not go away or get recycled, like old paper does.
There is no Law of Conservation of Information, so theoretically, there is no limit to the amount of information humankind will create. If the proverbial million monkeys on a million typewriters can generate the works of Shakespeare in a million years, is there a holistic summary that might come out of all the junk we are creating today, including this blog?
Are we those monkeys, and if so, who is Shakespeare? And more importantly, how will our children know that they are looking at the entire published works of Shakespeare when they see it all?
Douglas Adams, the Apple Macintosh, and Microsoft Word
Imagine, three of your favorites coming together in one newsworthy item: Douglas Adams, his love for Macs, and Microsoft Word bashing. :)
On alt.fan.douglasadams, KÃ¥re today posted an article by Douglas (from MacUser) on his pet peeve about Microsoft Word (don't we all have one ... or perhaps, more?) The absence of smart quotes apparently annoyed DNA quite a bit, and it's a humorous piece (if that wasn't obvious from who the author was). Go read the full article.
Here's a choice passage: it's the bartender talking to Douglas.
"One of my regulars - chap called Fred, perhaps you know him, little wizened grey-haired fellow, about thirtyish - told me he'd been using Word 1.05 for two years before he discovered that you could search for carriage returns and tabs after all. He just thought they'd omitted it out of spite. But no, it was in there alright. It was even in the manual. Just not so as you could find it, that's all. It was his brother Jim as discovered it. He was doing three month solitary at the time. 'At least give me something to read,' he pleaded with the warders."
"Heartless brutes, they gave him a Microsoft Word manual. He was a broken man at the end of it, but he did know which page the Special Characters search routines were on, as there's not many as can say that. It's an ill wind."
.Net Wrapper for Google Desktop Search
I've been reading the Google Desktop Developer Forums pretty often, partly to see what people have to say about my Spindle Search plugin, and partly to help whenever I can.
I realized that a lot of C# / .Net developers are reinventing the wheel when writing code for interoperating with the Google COM object. So I thought, why not separate that into a library (I already had the code written as part of Spindle Search.)
So there's now a new project, .Net Wrapper for Google Desktop Search, on my site.
CD / DVD Spindle Search
I've been a huge fan of Google Desktop Search, especially seeing how fast it is over the traditional file system search in Windows. But what I noticed it lacked, was the ability to index removable drives such as CDs, DVDs and external hard-disks. Even if it did index them, there is always the problem that the file might be unavailable when trying to retrieve it, simply because the CD is in a spindle, not in the drive.
But Google had a solution: they made their API accessible, so I wrote a plugin for it. Spindle Search now lets you add CDs, DVDs and other media to your Google Index, and then comes up with a dialog when you search for them, telling you where to locate the file and disk.
Go take a look, tell me what you think.
Jurassic Park ... what the movie left out
I utilized a day from Spring Break to catch up on some reading. Jurassic Park, the novel I'd wanted to read for a long time now, finally came up on my radar. I knew Crichton, I knew how the scenes would be described, I knew the subtle theoretical underpinnings to be expected from any Crichton creation, but his treatment of Ian Malcolm's character was absolutely fantastic.
Malcolm was the mathematician that John Hammond had recruited to analyse his Park, but wasn't happy at his skepticity since Day 1. Malcolm's character was underplayed in the movie in the interest of, I presume, keeping it simple. But his application of Chaos Theory to Jurassic Park made the best reading.
An excerpt, a pretty long one: (fair use, of course, as permitted by copyright law.)
"You know what's wrong with scientific power? It's a form of inherited wealth. And you know what assholes congenitally rich people are. It never fails. [...] Most kinds of power require a substantial sacrifice by whoever wants that power. There is an apprenticeship, a discipline lasting many years. Whatever kind of power you want. President of the company. Black belt in karate. Spiritual guru. Whatever it is you seek, you have to put in the time, the practice, the effort. You must give up a lot to get it. It has to be very important to you. And once you've attained it, it is your power. It can't be given away: it resides in you. It is literally the result of your discipline."</p>"Now what is interesting about this process is, by the time someone has acquired the ability to kill with his bare hands, he has also matured to the point where he won't use it unwisely. So that kind of power has a built-in control. The discipline of getting the power changes you so that you won't abuse it."
"But scientific power is like inherited wealth: attained without discipline. You read what others have done, and you take the next step. You can do it very young. You can make progress very fast. There is no discipline lasting many decades. There is no mastery: old scientists are ignored. There is no humility before nature. There is only a get-rich-quick, make-a-name-for-yourself-fast philosophy. Cheat, lie, falsify -- it doesn't matter. Not to you, or to your colleagues. No one will criticize you. No one has any standards. They are all trying to do the same thing: to do something big, and do it fast."
"And because you can stand on the shoulders of giants, you can accomplish something quickly. You don't even know exactly what you have done, but already you have reported it, patented it, and sold it. And the buyer will have even less discipline than you. The buyer simply purchases the power, like any commodity. The buyer doesn't even conceive that any discipline might be necessary."
