'Visible Identifiability' and 'Decoder Availability'

The Babylonian Plimpton 322 clay tablet, with
numbers written in cuneiform script, circa 1800 BC

Still on the subject of data storage....

Maris Rusis wrote an insightful comment yesterday: "It is not enough that data can be stored in an eternally stable form. The data reader, its software, and its power supply needs to be eternally stable and available as well. Who today maintains a reader for old style floppy discs or computer punch cards? Mike, perhaps nothing is truly archived unless it is directly human-eye readable like your negative and contact print files."

Those are two separate issues, it seems to me. "The data reader, its software, and its power supply needs to be eternally stable and available as well" might be called something like decoder availability. This is why I thought it was silly human folly to include the "golden records" aboard the Voyager space probes in 1977. The "message in a bottle" quality of the Voyagers themselves isn't ridiculous, because it's a gesture and a symbol (Voyager 1 is presently the manmade object farthest from Earth), but records are a data carrier that need a pretty preposterous Rube Goldberg contraption to play; expecting an alien civilization to be able to recognize the disks as data carriers and be able to reverse engineer a record player adds several factorials to the already almost infinitesimally minute chance that a thinking being will one day detect and intersect with Voyager.

...Unless you posit that there is another civilization out there in the Universe that not only harbors sentient hominids, but also sentient hominid audiophiles who happen to have Fozgometers. (And if you don't know what a Fozgometer is, you haven't been reading TOP long enough.)

Anyway, I've learned that the data encrypted on fused silica glass is recoverable (albeit sub-optimally) with an ordinary optical microscope. Of course it still needs to be decoded.

Everyone also seemed to think that the "glass could break." Fused silica is pure SiO₂. We're more familiar with borosilicate glass, which is common in household objects. Borosilicate glass is only about 80% pure, but you might be familiar with its physical toughness—I know it can withstand a drop to the floor (my floor is 3/4-inch cherry wood). I have a borosilicate drinking straw, and dropped it from a height of six feet on to a rock, and it did shatter. The most interesting thing I found in a short skate around the Web was this:

The theoretical tensile strength of silica glass is greater than 1 million psi. Unfortunately, the strength observed in practice is always far below this value. The reason is that the practical strength of glass is extrinsically determined rather than being solely a result of chemistry and atomic structure as is an intrinsic property like density. It is the surface quality in combination with design considerations and chemical effects of the atmosphere (water vapor in particular) that ultimately control the strength and reliability of a finished piece of quartz glass. Because of stress concentration on surface flaws, failure most always occurs in tension rather than compression.

In other words: "reliablility depends on...chance."

Fused silica is also vulnerable to an acid or two, but I can't re-find the exact names.

The other issue with the Project Silica panes is that they don't possess Visible Identifiability. "Identifiability" is a term I fished (half tongue-in-cheek) from statistics. Here it means the thing satisfies the "what the hell is this?" interrogation on the part of those who come to it cold. One of the big plusses of storing photographs as positive images on pieces of paper or negative images on transparent cellulose acetate or polyester is that when they are encountered by that all-important personage known as "Any Idiot," assuming some unspecified threshhold IQ on the part of said personage, he or she can deduce from inspection what it is. This is important. When someone in the future comes cold to that little 75mm square of glass pictured in the illustration yesterday, it's not going to be immediately apparent that it is in fact the timeless 1978 cultural treasure Superman starring Christopher Reeve.

The key to both these issues is probably the selfsame "adoption and acceptance" we were talking about yesterday. The greater the extent to which Project Silica 'panes' (do they call them panes, or what?) become the standard for permanent WORA cloud storage for any length of time, the more and more likely it is that "the data reader, its software, and its power supply" will continue to be available past the viability window of the technology; and if its use becomes sufficiently widespread, it's also likely that some people will continue to be able to recognize what it is, in the same way that there are still people around who can identify "old style floppy discs or computer punch cards," medieval scrolls penned in Latin, and Babylonian clay tablets.

The Fozgometer will doubtless be a great insoluble puzzle for future archaeologists. But it's pretty amazing, really, that we have Babylonian clay tablets that we know refer to the passage of Haley's Comet (then not yet thus named) in 164 BC and 87 BC. That's successful long-term storage.

Mike
(Thanks to Maris)

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Featured Comments from:

James Weekes: "I read a piece, years ago, that I wish I could find. It told of a man who went and lived with one of those isolated tribes in S. America. He stayed for quite a while and took a lot of pictures (on film). He returned home and had enlargements made of his favorites. Some of people, some of animals and the surrounding landscapes. He returned to the village and showed the people the prints. They had no idea what they were. They could not 'see' a face or an animal, just color on paper. It was because they had art, no drawing, therefore no visual literacy. So, even if we send prints, and the next intelligent life finds them, they might not recognize them for what they are."

Mike replies: I wasn't actually suggesting we need to make photographs visibly identifiable for the sake of aliens, but regarding your point, I'll just say that it took my older dog three years before she could detect dogs on the television. But as soon as she learned the trick, she started barking at the ones she saw. Soon she got so good at recognizing them that sometimes she would bark at a dog on the TV that I hadn't noticed yet, which caused me to start looking for—and often, to my amusement, find—the dog on the screen, and once she even barked at a cartoon dog. So I'm betting the Yanomami could be taught to decode photographs, and I'll venture to guess it wouldn't take as long as three years. Also regarding your point, how could anyone know that aliens would be able to see? Perhaps they evolved on a planet that was perpetually shrouded in dust, and it was of no use to them to sense particular wavelengths of radiation. Perhaps they evolved enormous ears, the better to hear things happening in the dust-fog. And for that matter, why would we suppose they'd have to have ears either? How could we even suppose that they share the same basic DNA code we share with animals, which prescribes a thorax, appendages, a control center, and a variety of sensory mechanisms? It's been argued that many human creations, from automobiles to a Civil War army, unconsciously mimic that basic structure (automobiles have two eyes, four paws, a heart, even an anus...). Naturally we like to assume that alien beings would need to follow the same blueprint, but it's only human nature to presume so.

Martin D: "Interesting issues raised in your last few posts, Mike. How can we make our photographs survive the passage of time? How easy will it be for our unknown future friends to 'read' our photo archives?

"There is something magical about the self-explanatory and self-archiving nature of analogue photography. I am delighted to have moved to digital, but I miss the 'naturalness' of the silver medium.

"A silver print need not be decoded: the archival medium already is the final output. And if processed well, the silver print will store well without the need for us to continually reformat it along the way. With digital we don't need to worry about mold attacks and such like—hooray!—but it requires continual renewal of both the physical medium and the coding/decoding technology. This is perfectly OK, of course—we can live with it—but it breaks the spell. We can manage this process, but the very fact that we need to manage the process makes the process distinctly anti-Tao. The Tao version of photographic storage would make us produce our best pictures in some physical medium that self-perpetuates and self-repairs and that can be picked up by anybody, at any time in the future, when it will explain itself to that future viewer in a language that that viewer can understand.

"Nothing beats B&W transparency film in that regard. Agfa Scala 120, in 6x9cm format from my Fuji GW690: for me that was the absolute dream of photographic output. So beautiful on the lightbox, and so self-explanatory. If an alien visitor in the year 2232 finds the box with my Agfa Scala portrait of my father, they will require no help to decode it. They will understand that it is a photograph, they will understand what a photograph is and why humans took photographs, and they will see that my father was a good and kind man. Now, let's hope that at some point we can find a similar archival Tao in digital."

Mike replies: It's curious, but once one accepts as a value the idea that pictures should last, we then immediately confront the opposite problem, which is: for how long, and for whom? I'm privileged to have seen the world's oldest surviving photograph, "View from the Window at Le Gras," at the National Gallery show "On The Art of Fixing a Shadow: 150 Years of Photography" in 1989 (the book is one of the better visual tours of that period, and is still in print), and it's now 193 years old. Conveniently, that's about the presumed lifespan of today's inkjet prints made with the better materials. So that's sort of my own standard—that is, my idea of what picture life expectancy (LE) constitutes. It conforms pretty well with your selection of the year 2232 in your post.

Probably the biggest problem in this regard is that only a tiny minority of photographic pictures can or will be produced with LE in mind...and the problem then becomes which ones to choose for that honor. The sad truth is that a.) no one has much of an idea which pictures the future will value, and b.) insofar as we think about it at all, we seem to be remarkably bad at guessing. For the most part, photographers seem to assume that one day they themselves will be celebrated at heroes of the visual imagination, and that therefore whatever they produced will be valued for the simple reason that they produced it. This seems, shall we say, optimistic. It's essentially just an expressing of the ego, however touching that might be. But even photographers who use posterity's potential interest as an organizing principle for their work—those broadly known as documentary photographers—don't actually know what the future will need. Maybe they'll spend their time documenting great public works or city scenes, whereas the future will be surfeited with such scenes and actually need something else, something nobody now even thinks to make pictures of. An analogy for that can be found in the fact that for many eras of history, only the activities and concerns of the ruling classes and aristocracies were deemed worthy of attention and preservation, whereas historians today are relatively starved for information about the working classes and underclasses such as slaves. The point is that we as photographers are very bad at certain things, and among the things we are worst at are editing and selecting—in many ways, but especially those ways that put the interest of posterity uppermost in mind.

John Nollendorfs: "Real photographers make prints!"

Mike replies: I feel ya, my brother, but, to take your statement seriously, isn't that really just another accident of history, like the statement "real photographs are black-and-white"? We were forced to make prints for decades because the most efficient and convenient —and hence most widespread—medium happened to be a double-negative process. Without prints we couldn't look at what we had photographed. But there's nothing inherent in today's digital imaging that favors or prioritizes prints. Actually somewhat the opposite, because the print-form now inhibits sharing rather than promoting it, as it used to do; using a print as the container for the image restricts access to those in its physical presence, which is like parking it in an out-of-the-way place where very few people will ever be able to discover it and experience it.

And since we're blue-skying about aliens and such-like here, how about this for a fanciful premise: maybe in 50 years people will simply assume that it's the nature of images to be ephemeral. They're made in their numberless billions to be shared in the present or for some limited time, and it's their nature to be obliterated after some shortish interval, for instance when the person whose phone it's on gets a new phone or when the online photo-sharing service that is "storing" the image on its servers goes belly-up and vaporizes all its holdings. At that time, maybe there will arise a small fringe movement of contrarian craftspeople who militate for putting images in a fixed form meant to last for 200 years, and all the crusty beardy photo-dawgs of that future era—today's twentysomethings—will be saying things like "real images are meant to be temporary!"

I'm just sayin'.  :-)

Mike Chisholm: "Re 'Haley's Comet'...you (or your secret, semi-literate amanuensis) are doing it again. Just stop it. Hell hath no fuming like a pedant provoked."

Mike replies: Well, I don't know what the woman's name was! I'm no astrologer. Was it "Hailey"?  :-D

Comments

[David Evans]

The Voyagers carried an actual phono cartridge and stylus along with a diagram intended to show how to use it. Maybe not so silly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record#/media/File:Voyager_Golden_Record_Cover_Explanation.svg

[Nick]

I don't know the real complexities of decoding information (sound) from a record player, but imagine if we received such an object from an obviously alien source. I'm reasonably certain that we would spend whatever time and money were required to decode it ASAP. Surely NASA or some governments would throw billions at it in either the name of science, or national security, or commercial advantage. With at least WWII era technology I don't think it would last that long.

I guess it's a similar story to the first half of Contact by Carl Sagan!

[Nick]

Fused silica can be dissolved in hydrofluoric acid (HF). In my current job, my group uses it to dissolve silica (and related compounds) on a regular basis.

I've worked with many nasty things (e.g. chlorine gas, kilogram quantities of molten arsenic selenide, radioactive materials); HF is the thing I've worked with that makes me the most anxious. It is nasty, nasty stuff.

[robert e]

Human readability and extraterrestrial recognizability are different issues and probably shouldn't be conflated. I think an LP is actually a decent choice for the latter. Those patterns of irregularities in that groove are not symbolic code and any entities capable of examining them in detail and familiar with harmonic oscillations should at least recognize them as such. That beats even cuneiform tablets for recognizability and interpretability, at least by aliens, and at least in my poorly informed opinion.

Hopefully, attempts to "read" that groove will proceed in the correct direction, otherwise the aliens might think that Paul is dead.

[robert e]

By the way, the Voyager Golden Records can be heard as a Spotify playlist, one I'm finding surprisingly diverse and enjoyable (even as I disagree with some inclusions omissions).

[Tim Bradshaw]

In fact the Voyager records have with them the stylus needed to play them, together with images on their covers describing how they are to be played (in particular from the outside in and at what speed, expressed in terms of the spectrum of hydrogen which anyone capable of space travel would be aware of, also pictorially represented on the cover of the record) and how to reconstruct images &c encoded on the records. All this is done using diagrams which it's hoped anyone finding them would have a hope of understanding.

It turns out the people who made these things were not stupid, and spent quite a lot of time thinking about this question.

[speed]

Thinking about long term storage and reproduction of images, sounds, data and the like is interesting. But the problem may be one of what is important enough to bother storing for future generations. How do we know today what will be important or even of interest 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 years from now? Should we permanently store everything? Not possible now. And if we could, how would we index it?

Which brought me to one of the most important, and if not important, most interesting of all early photographs: The Wright Brothers’ First Flight.

Tom Crouch, in Air & Space Magazine wrote, “Earlier that morning, Orville Wright had set up the camera on a tripod pointed at the spot where he thought the airplane might be in the air. When three members of the U.S. Lifesaving Service Station at Kill Devil Hills walked up from the beach to help out, Wilbur handed John T. Daniels the bulb that would activate the shutter and told him to squeeze it if anything interesting happened.”
https://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/wright-brothers-first-flight-photo-annotated-180949489/

Indeed, something interesting happened. Something important and, it turned out, historic. And a 6,603 x 4,280 pixel version of the photograph is available with the click of a mouse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:First_flight2.jpg

And then there’s Earthrise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthrise#/media/File:NASA-Apollo8-Dec24-Earthrise.jpg

[MikeR]

Two thoughts, from a not always reliable memory*:

1. Didn't NASA also include a pictorial that showed how to build a "player" for those disks? ON the disk?

2. I read a while back that the Library of Congress "transcribed" everything onto LP-type disks, that could be "read" via analog contraptions, precisely because digital media was evolving too fast to keep up?

* Well, the memory might still be there, but the "player" is getting a bit unreliable.

[psu]

There always seem to be people motivated enough to keep things alive and readable...

Here is a site describing a product that reads old Apple ][ floppy disks by actually sensing the timing between the magnetic fluxes on the media itself and then using that to reconstruct the data:

https://wiki.reactivemicro.com/Applesauce

Normally to read media like this you need to be able to control the Apple floppy hardware directly with software running on an actual Apple ][ because only the actual Apple ][ can talk to the actual disk drive in the way that's needed.

However, having recorded the timing of the pulses you can now feed that information to an *emulated* Apple floppy drive running on your Mac, and run the copy protected software just fine.

I think if people are still reading very fragile 40 year old magnetic media that was encoded in a way that was specifically designed to be hard to read ... we'll probably be able to preserve whatever is important to preserve.

[Clay Olmstead]

Another way to facilitate decoding would be to store each movie with its own Rosetta Stone: a short sequence of stills taken from the movie, with the analog soundtrack. Admittedly, the soundtrack would require some work to decode, but the clip of people moving their lips would give the future decoders something to go by.

[Bob G.]

I experimented with archiving some of my digital files by photographing them on film off of a good monitor. The logic is that since I view and maybe tweak them on this monitor which isn’t the absolute state of the art, but good, they’ll at least be representative of how I see them under normal conditions. Then I just store them like the other negatives or transparencies. I print some of course, but since many are viewed on the monitor first, I thought the film might be the one of the archived sources, in addition to a normal hard drive somewhere. Sort of establishing the “ visible identifiability”...

[Scott]

Clearly, the original floppies are no longer recognizable by “any idiot”. In fact, I suspect most adults today would not recognize them.

My grandchildren - no idiots, they - had no idea what the fully mechanical typewriter on my shelf was, although they might figure it out when they get older.

[Graeme Scott]

'Fused silica is also vulnerable to an acid or two, but I can't re-find the exact names.'

Hydrofluoric acid. I have a job to do this week which involves using this stuff. I agree with Nick, it's really nasty s**t.

[Rob de Loe]

Decades ago I worked on a project where I had to root through boxes at the archive. These boxes contained all the correspondence over a couple decades among some key players in something I was interested in.

Now think about that for a sec... It was possible to read all the correspondence; it was only a few boxes full. Consider today. We're drowning in information that future historians might be interested in, but I highly doubt they'll ever do what I did.

It's not just the medium and the format (emails, texts, Word files, WordPerfect files...). It's the overwhelming volume of information we're producing.

So sure, go ahead and archive all your stuff forever on "panes" or whatever if it makes you feel better. But I'm confident it will be safe from the prying eyes of future historians by virtue of being lost in millions of boxes of panes full of mundane ephemera.

[Stephen Scharf]

The use of an SME V tonearm with my Michell Gyro SE turntable (TT) obviates the need for Fozgometer as the "V" is not adjustable for azimuth; SME obtains incredibly tight tolerances in design and assembly.

But, even if i didn't own the Michell-SME deck, I'd own a Rega, and Rega's superb tonearms are not adjustable for azimuth, either.

Gotta hand it to Alastair Robertson-Aikman (founder of SME) and Roy Gandy (founder of Rega) for some really nice mechanical engineering.

No Fozgometer 'round these parts...the best tool is the one you don't need.

[c.d.embrey]

Photos are ephemeral—some with a lifespan of only a few minuets. So why all the worry about preserving them?

[Ken]

"How could we even suppose that [aliens] share the same basic DNA code we share with animals, which prescribes a thorax, appendages, a control center, and a variety of sensory mechanisms?"

Reminds me of an episode from the original Star Trek tv series in which some rocks that humans were mining on a distant planet turned out to be alien life forms that were nothing like what humans could imagine as "life."

[Ernie Van Veen]

I would just like to remind everyone that it is, in fact, Halley's Comet, not Haley's Comet. Phew! Crisis averted. Now, I'm off to rock around the clock.

[By Bill Halley! I see what you did there. --Mike]

[bryan willman]

The observation that a later party (human or alien) might not be able to decode, or if they could decode, understand a message, image, etc., is very well placed.

Here's another issue.

What if they just do not care? At all?

There was a story (maybe here?) of a portrait photographer who took a nice protrait of man back to the man (in some market) and the reply was "what am I supposed to do with this?"

I am personally harsher - commercial interests want to give me or send me all manner of little stuff, and my reply is always "you can throw that away as easily as I can...."

It is ENTIRELY possible that any future entity, looking at any saved work of art (or data of any other form) will value it no more than we value the stories on aged fishwrap newspaper.

[Stan B.]

I was kinda obsessed with preserving my images (negatives) for the long haul. I stored them in small fire proof "safes," until I read that they weren't really all that fireproof, and could be subject to ensuing water damage. So I researched further and got one that was even more heat resistant, complete with rubber sealing that would also prevent water damage. Threw in some desiccant, and laughed in the face of time!

I then noticed that a couple of documents I had also thrown in now appeared shriveled up, probably due to the desiccant, so I took it out since I didn't want anything detrimental affecting my precious negs- besides the rubber sealing would keep out the nasty moisture anyway. Except... the sealing actually locked in the moisture, providing a mold/mildew heaven within.

Fortunately, I caught the damage before said negs were completely eaten away, and most can be salvaged after CONSIDERABLE... effort. There's a lesson in there somewhere,
probably something to do with ego, nature and the acceptance of our temporal plane. These days, I just transfer whatever I've restored along with my recent digital unto gold discs- and whatever happens, happens... My reject negs remain in shoe boxes clean and robust to the day.

[Kodachromeguy]

Mike you wrote about what might happen in 50 years: "They're made in their numberless billions to be shared in the present or for some limited time, and it's their nature to be obliterated after some shortish interval, for instance when the person whose phone it's on gets a new phone or when the online photo-sharing service that is "storing" the image on its servers goes belly-up." That is happening today. Even the "serious" digital guy who uses RAID devices and the cloud - you think he or any of his family members ever really review his 10^5 snapshots of his weekend in Paris? That stuff is not gone but is essentially forgotten. There is too much of it. No one cares. No one has the time. (Don't get me started on the millions of hours of GoPro videos of ski runs and the equivalent....)

[Peter Croft]

Halley's Comet, Mike. Named for Edmond Halley in 1705.

When it last approached the Sun in 1986 I drove out into the bush away from the city lights in the early morning before dawn to try to see it. I have only a memory of a diffuse cloud of light in the SE sky. There was no chance of photographing it in those days. At least I can say I saw it.

[c.d.embrey]

Photos are ephemeral.

[Not all of them are. I have family Daguerreotypes from the 1840s, tintypes from the 1860s, platinum prints from the 1890s, and glass plate negatives from the 1910s. And as I mentioned, I've seen in person the oldest surviving photograph in the world, from 1826 or '27. --Mike]

[Zack Schindler]

"Naturally we like to assume that alien beings would need to follow the same blueprint, but it's only human nature to presume so."

This is one of the things I loved about the remake of The Thing and Arrival. Most sci-fi movies and TV depict alien life as vaguely humanoid. Not in those movies. The odds on lifeforms repeating on other planets would be low. Just look at the diversity of life here.

[misha]

It's already been addressed:

Treasures Kept Safe in Salt Mines Below the Kansas Prairie / Hollywood films share space with dull documents

https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Treasures-Kept-Safe-in-Salt-Mines-Below-the-2778029.php