

The Cosmological Limits of Information Storage - benbreen
http://blog.longnow.org/02015/02/12/the-cosmological-limits-of-information-storage/

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partomniscient
To go off on a tangent, I (and I believe I'm not alone in this) have always
been annoyed at date/time handling... the leading 0 in the date of the article
made me consider yetanotherdateformat.

3 parts:

'left' delimiter 'right' (delimiter not allowed in 'left' or 'right')

'left' is machine readable date format in descending order of precedence e.g.
...000CCYYMMDD-hh:mm:ss.... in UTC.

'right' is 'Human and/or machine readable date format' \- which is dependent
on locale, and contains the fabulous mess we already have.

And the 'left' and 'right' parts should validate/reconcile each other, and if
they don't - you go to 'hell'/'a re-education cent[er|re]' via a road paved
with NAND gates or something.

The point being it should sort properly, resulting in a kind of lame yet
highly useful self contained static hash table.

It's not preferred solution, but at least a step in the right direction in
cleaning up the existing mess...?

I also acknowledge we could still end up at the equivalent of
[https://xkcd.com/927](https://xkcd.com/927)

Sorry for the ramble, maybe this is the final part of relieving stress from
the fixing Y2K issues in COBOL and fighting with MM/DD parts of dates auto-
magically swapping in early versions of Microsoft Office products... mumble,
order of precedence... the USA is not the Cosmos ... mumble

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rdc12
The Long Now date format isn't really a new date format thou, its just a
symbolic extra digit to encourage thinking long term, it really is the same
format in essence.

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Florin_Andrei
So, even if you literally live forever, you'll definitely have amnesia.

Wait, chromosomes are data storage devices too. So life as we know it cannot
continue to function forever. Some sort of massive reboot-on-the-fly would be
required periodically.

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erroneousfunk
Do you remember any events from when you were born? What did you have for
lunch on this date 10 years ago? What did you have for lunch today? We already
have amnesia, via data compression :)

~~~
partomniscient
I think this was loosely the basis for an episode of House.

Do you want analog or digital?

Do you want lossy compression and reduced overheads or lossless compression
and a perfect albeit perhaps slower memory?

Or as Alan Watts might put it: Prickles or Goo?

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smilekzs
Read: spherical cows in vacuum.

