Technology that refuses to die

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So far gas and oil are giving good returns. That is because the damage to the environment is not taken into account properly.

ruveyn

No, that is not what I tried to convey. I just tried to systematically disassemble your argument - like any disputation participant would have to do in order to be taken seriously, before presenting their own convictions. Though, doing it in a manner such as to appear unapproachably intelligent and so unparallelably thought-through that I'd be able to win the argument through attaining reciprocal awe, unconditional respect, likes and other forms of lazy obliviousness alone - and apparently not succeeding at all, and instead probably emerging as a big douche with megalomanical narcissism as primary attribute - together with a host of linguistic disorders having to do with not acquiring comprehension from my conversational audience.

Last edited by Kenjuudo on 21 Mar 2013, 6:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.

To actually answer your rhetorical question, instead of just continuing my pointless ramble of self-indignation, I gather I'd have to make a more substantive analogy:

• All birds are animals, but not all animals are birds.
  The elucidation of an affinitive one-to-many relation.

You see, while all technology is based in the real world, I didn't mean that everything in the real world is a technology.

But then, by including the consideration of perspectives external to our pronounced circumscriptions into our definition - that is, a rationalization that a given supposition doesn't necessarily have to be constituting (or even subsuming) an instigation by humans in order to have "technology" be a congruously felicitous denomination - anything could in fact be considered a technology of somebody or something...

EDIT: Though, I guess that wouldn't be very pertinent to the more explicit and methodizing nomenclature of "human technology"... Is that what we were chatting about?

Mercury sphygs. General practitioners (at least in Britain) love them and are slow at moving over to electronic NIBP machines. In some older GP practices you can find mercury sphygs bolted to walls.

Paper based record systems

Your entire net worth is stored on the bank systems harddrives.. granted it is in more than one place but kinda scary if you think about it.


You gotta have a lot of faith to trust your civilization's hundreds of years of discovery to a quickly rotating metal disk with a warranty.



Our technology is good, but i'm still all for paper birth certificates. Wouldn't want anyone to get deleted by accident.

It is backed up frequently and redundantly. Magnetic surfaces hold their magnetic orientation and they are less succeptable to destruction than paper, which burns to ashes.

ruveyn

I'm not against using harddrives.. just saying that wanting to do away with paper altogether is pretty brave and kind of silly, considering harddrives aren't a time-honored method. They are very new, history-wise..

The fact that they allow data multiplication to more than one place at a time is their saving grace. And as solid state becomes more reliable who knows.. we may go paperless in the end.


Can you imagine a harddrive lasting over a 3 year sea voyage, getting bounced around, exposed to moisture, dust, static, sand. And then needing electricity to power it up when your done with all that? In any environment other than ours harddrives start to become inaccessible. When you can't get at your data it's no longer any good to you!

We like to think we are above old methods just because there's something new, but you can't say pen and paper require micrometer-levels of precision!

I expect much the same thing was said as paper began to replace stone or clay tablets.
"What, use that flimsy nonsense to store valuable data?! But it burns, and water washes off the writing!"

Yes, easily. Every technology requires a "care and feeding" regime - even paper, and if the benefits of using a technology are great (as they clearly are with hard disks), then those requirements simply become absorbed into that functionality. It just becomes "this is what's needed to use X".
Look at the way a ship's compass was carefully mounted, to ensure it functioned properly in rough seas - or chronographs, used in calculating a position.
Any precision technology requires some degree of protection but generally, as a technology improves through new ideas, the requirements for protection diminish - hence the electronic compass, GPS and SSDs.

I think paper (and paper-like material) holds a relatively unique position because we're able to convey meaning simply by scratching marks on it, and that extreme level of simple functionality is unlikely to be completely replaced.
But when several million pages of information can be moved or duplicated with 100% accuracy in seconds, why would paper even be considered practical in those situations?

Making marks or pictures on more or less flat surfaces goes back at least 25,000 years. Paper is just the latest flat surface to make a permanent mark on. And ink does not wash off. Just the other day, I read from a Torah Scroll that was at least 200 years old. The ink look fine on the parchment.

ruveyn

^ Yes. Probably because it's been cared for and not immersed in water... or are you saying that the ink was deliberately made waterproof and had survived being immersed in water? Advanced indeed, if so.

I just meant that paper was a new-fangled gadget once too and compared to what it replaced, it seems a fragile non-starter.
But for the "cost" of having to care for it differently, it becomes possible to stack 100 sheets in considerably less space than a stack of 100 clay tablets. That convenience, among many others, was why it succeeded.

The kind of ink the sophets and the scribes used was waterproof. The only way it could be removed is by scraping.

ruveyn

In which case, I am impressed. Clearly they understood the weaknesses of the medium.

I've had plenty of documents disappear because of bad clerical work, however, anything that was digitized is still a part of my record.

Managing paper systems doesn't allow for many mistakes, you have to keep the documents in the folders, folders in a filing cabinet. If any one of the two doesn't end up in the right place, theres a loss of data and no backup to correct it.

But that would be the whole reason the photocopier exists! It's a bit more trouble for sure, which is why only the important stuff is kept "hard-copy" now... I agree, a whole stack of papers is not as fun as hitting "find" though.


Some companies still don't backup their digital files till after the huge system crash, so it's really the same problem in a new form I guess..




I remember being in the paper making group at summer camp lol.. the trading actually went something like that.

And I can't believe a harddive would make it, keeping in mind the boat is a leaky wooden thing with sails. Not a modern airconditioned gps guided yacht!

Maybe if it was wrapped in bubble wrap, surrounded by silica gel packs, in a tupperware container, in a metal box filled with cotton. Did they have UPS back then?

Well even those leaky wooden things were good enough to travel the world, spending months at sea, so that's more likely "a bit damp in places".
Besides, boat technology has moved on somewhat since the old tea clipper days...

No, but they didn't have hard disks either.