Thursday August 12, 2004

Rock, paper, printers

Following on from Monday's entry, I would like to explore the evolution of technology.

Technological progress stems from the sharing of ideas. I don't pretend to be anywhere near as smart as Jonathan Schwartz, or even have the great hair. But he made be think with his last posting on the definition of open. I'd like to explore a few thoughts in the area of openness of ideas.

This idea jumped into my head today as I was printing a document. Bear with me for a minute, and you will see the connection. I think it will be worth it for you.

Humanity is the condition or quality of being human. At least that is my favorite definition for the word (it can be taken to mean a group of people). The human condition is not a thing that can be explained completely. It is open ended. It is tragic, funny, fantastic, full of miscalculations, and very, very lucky all at the same time. The only true way to explain it is through anecdotes. Small stories to explain one or more facets of the human condition. All the stories are different, and there is an ever growing number of them. All of them together is as close as we can come to a proper description.

Humanity can't be explained without history. It simply cannot be conveyed in a few celebrated words. Humanity is evolving and due to one aspect of the human condition, that history cannot be remembered by individual people. They don't last very long. I mean, people have amazing uptime and all, but when compared to the entire history of the human animal, you simply cannot consider any person "Highly Available". There is no person that knows everything because it would take many lifetimes to learn everything, and a knot of cranial wrinkles far larger than the human body could possibly carry at the top of its frame to store everything.

In terms of objective storage of historic events and messages, we are restricted pretty much to the written word. Never mind that language itself evolves over time to lose or amplify the nuance in the original words. The words themselves were stored on stone tablets and later, paper. What a marvelous scheme! Write it down. Keep it. It won't change at all.

Consider writing on stone. I need to write something down so I go to the quarry and purchase a piece of granite, sandstone, limestone, etc. The price varies, so I choose the medium that matches the need. If my project is to create a shopping list, I would go with the less expensive sandstone model. Really it doesn't matter that much. Stone is big and heavy. And if I write while I'm angry, I could accidently break it. Also, I can't write that much, because I don't have the energy to haul more than a couple of pages around with me at a time. Do you think they are going to write a receipt for my tablets at the quarry? Think about it - of course not! If they did that, we would have records of such transactions.

The point of looking at this age in particular is that it didn't make sense to educate everyone. What do the children learn to write with? The medium simply doesn't scale. The society needed a few folk that were able to write in stone, and the rest were responsible for providing food, mining for good sheets of rock, and of course, providing beauty services.

The transition from stone to paper made it possible to write more events down. For the size and weight of one stone tablet (single spaced, double sided), you could store hundreds of pages using paper. Of course social policies rarely keep up with changes in technology, so not everyone got an education. But paper made it possible for a far greater number of people to keep their thoughts objective and share them with others. Those lucky folk could participate in the recording of events defining the human condition of the time.

Enter today. Some people keep notebooks of their thoughts and activities. That isn't a very flexible scheme. How do you search on things? Your memory? Maybe. If you do that, perhaps you should write a short index to help you find things quickly. Hey, since you are coming from before recorded history with that memory indexing scheme, why not ease into it slowly? Start by writing your index on a small granite tablet that you keep with your notebook.

I like to think that most people today use electronic documents for things that are important enough to keep for the purposes of looking at later. This transition is similar to the stone to paper transition. Consider the weight of your computer. Include the monitor, if you like. In terms of weight, how much paper might that represent? Now consider that you have a 70GB hard drive in the machine. How many pages of text could you store on your machine? A quick estimate says that my machine and monitor weigh about the same as 11500 sheets of paper. The ratio is far better for my laptop computer though.

For my estimate, I'll use 60 lines per side, 120 lines of 80 column text per page. That is approximately 110 million characters of storage on paper. You do print double sided, don't you? If not, I have a little secret that can give you a 50% cost and weight savings.

As for my machine, let us assume that I only have 60GB of hard drive free because I have an operating system and other stuff taking up space. That leaves approximately 64.5 billion characters of storage. Approximately the equivalent of 6.7 million pieces of paper.

Ok, that's really cool. I know that, having just seen that stunningly large number, there is at least one of you trying to do a back of the napkin estimate of how long it would take to print that amount of information out. Let's see, a printer might do 20 pages per minute, that would be about...

STOP IT RIGHT THERE!! You are going backwards in time. You might as well be calculating how long it would take your headstone engraver to write it all out on granite. Or how long it would it take a group of Christmas carolers to memorize the whole thing in the form of a song.

That's the point! I shouldn't have been printing anything out today. Human technology has brought us a tremendous amount of compression and convenience between stone media and modern storage. When you have to print something out, you are traveling back in time. When you buy a new printer, I hope you are able to trade in your goggles and chisel for a good deal on it.

Paper is not a very good force multiplier either. It only has influence over those that see it. That is great for information privacy. Not so great for participating in the human condition in a lasting way.

I have been working on my skills at viewing and understanding documents on line for many years now. I am actually quite good at it. But sometimes I get lazy and pick up my chisel and goggles in an attempt to save time.

Now I have to chuckle a bit. I can sometimes see the future, and today it seems crystal clear. Someone has probably printed out this entry to make it easier for them to follow. Imagine the irony of reading these words on the last page of that endeavor!