Love this :) It's interesting to think about the many different kinds of decay, the corruption of data and the crystallizing varnish on a violin. For me, decay is the flip side of change, and what decays gracefully can yield to the new all the more easily. I don't think our digital systems decay particularly gracefully, and I wonder if we'll come up with ones that do, where the bits harden instead of dissolving into information soup. A fun think for a weekend!
This is why I like the cloud. Everything breaks and decays, in the end, paper or electronic. To propagate a signal forward through time, to preserve its information, we have no option but to *copy* it, spread it as widely as possible, make fresh copies when old ones fall apart. When the guys in the Amazon data centers walk the aisles every morning and pull all the dead hard drives and replace them with new ones that get fresh copies, they're following a tradition that goes back to monks in the dark ages carefully copying out crumbling Roman classics for posterity, and from there back to DNA itself, the ultimate master of the art.
Love this :) It's interesting to think about the many different kinds of decay, the corruption of data and the crystallizing varnish on a violin. For me, decay is the flip side of change, and what decays gracefully can yield to the new all the more easily. I don't think our digital systems decay particularly gracefully, and I wonder if we'll come up with ones that do, where the bits harden instead of dissolving into information soup. A fun think for a weekend!
This is why I like the cloud. Everything breaks and decays, in the end, paper or electronic. To propagate a signal forward through time, to preserve its information, we have no option but to *copy* it, spread it as widely as possible, make fresh copies when old ones fall apart. When the guys in the Amazon data centers walk the aisles every morning and pull all the dead hard drives and replace them with new ones that get fresh copies, they're following a tradition that goes back to monks in the dark ages carefully copying out crumbling Roman classics for posterity, and from there back to DNA itself, the ultimate master of the art.
Sound ripening is a really good notion to think about today. Here is a bouquet of imaginary Minnesota flowers in thanks.