Category Archives: Technology and Society

Popular Culture, Technology and Society

Disappearing Art

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We’re losing our movies:

The report’s authors state the data explosion could turn into digital movie extinction, unless the studios push the development of storage standards and data management practices that will guarantee long-term access of their content.

As the report points out, even if a 100-year black box were invented that “read data reliably without introducing any errors, required no maintenance and offered sufficient bit density at an affordable price,” there would be nobody alive capable of repairing it if that box were to fail at 99 years. In the real world of data management, digital assets are stored on media with longevities much less than 100 years, vulnerable to temperature changes, humidity and static electricity. It can be misidentified, inadequately indexed and difficult to track.

Also, whereas a well-preserved 35mm negative has traditionally contained enough information to fulfill any requirement for ancillary markets, there’s a question in the minds of some industry observers about whether the quality of masters archived in digital formats will be sufficient for quality duplication. In an age when home movie systems can often provide a better experience than some commercial theaters, that’s not an unimportant concern.

This is a problem that cryonicists face as well. How do you preserve the data that defines your life and identity over an indefinite period of time? No static media can be relied on–they all deteriorate eventually. I know that I have lots of floppies from the eighties that are probably unreadable now.

Data is going to have to be stored dynamically, and continually moved to new systems as the technology evolves. It will also have to be stored holographically, and distributed. Fortunately, the costs of digital data storage are plunging, with terabyte drives now available for the cost of multi-megabytes twenty years ago, and that trend is likely to continue as we get into molecular storage.

Space, Technology and Society

No Ten-Year Plans

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Ron Bailey has some thoughts on top-down government-driven technology programs:

The motivation behind the Apollo moon shot program was largely geopolitical. The Soviets had launched the first artificial satellite in 1957 and orbited the first man around the planet in 1961. As a NASA history explains, “First, and probably most important, the Apollo program was successful in accomplishing the political goals for which it had been created. Kennedy had been dealing with a Cold War crisis in 1961 brought on by several separate factors–the Soviet orbiting of Yuri Gagarin and the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion only two of them–that Apollo was designed to combat.” The Apollo program cost $25.4 billion (about $150 billion in current dollars) to land just 12 astronauts on the moon. It is curious that Shellenberger and Nordhaus cite the Apollo program as an example of transformative technologies since it was basically a technological dead end.

Yes, and one that NASA seems determined to repeat.

Technology and Society

What A Great Job To Have

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Some people get all the fun. You could charge admission to watch a test like this:

The secret payload traveled a distance of 3.61 miles in about six seconds on three sleds. Each sled ignited in stages to propel the cargo down the track. A helium tent enclosed nearly three miles of the 10-mile track in order to reduce the aerodynamic heating and drag on the payload.

Despite our earlier speculation, no one is saying what it was that traveled so fast. Navy sources did admit that, on top of the multiple sonic booms heard in the desert, the payload itself detonated at the end of the track.

I’ll bet it did.

Science And Society, Technology and Society

We Need Science In Medicine

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One of the prevailing myths of modern life (I use the word here in the sense of something that everyone believes, not necessarily something that is false) is that cholesterol causes heart disease and stroke, and that reducing it will reduce the risk of heart disease and stroke. But the recent Vytorin issue should give us cause to question this conventional wisdom.

Whenever I’ve looked at the research, I’ve never been able to see any clear indication that taking cholesterol-reducing medication actually reduces risk, per se–all that the clinical studies that I’ve seen seem to indicate is that cholesterol reduction is taking place. But correlation is not causation. It could be that both high cholesterol and vascular disease are caused by some third factor that hasn’t been identified, and that in reducing cholesterol, whether by diet or medication, or both, we are treating a symptom rather than a cause.

My point is, that I don’t know the answer. But I don’t have a lot of confidence that the medical community does, either. And I remain wary of taking medications with unknown side effects and potential for interaction with other things I ingest, when the benefit is unclear. And I write this as someone who lost both parents to heart disease (my father’s first heart attack occurred when he was about forty five, and he died from a second one about a decade later). But they also had much different lifestyles than I did–they grew up with poor diets during the depression, they both smoked like chimneys, and they were both overweight. So I don’t necessarily believe that genetics is destiny, at least in this case.