Dredging up memories

[altivo]

We went to a cocktail party this afternoon (not something we do often) in honor of two friends who have just turned 70 and 65 in recent weeks. Now this should have been a perfectly normal and somewhat boring event but it was brightened up for me almost as soon as we arrived. We were being introduced to various people when a woman who looked somehow familiar announced that she already knew me but I would have to figure out from where.

It took the better part of an hour before I was quite confident of it, but I got it right. She and I were in the same 370 assembly language class when we started at Time Inc. back in 1980. That's 30 years ago now. Eeek. We had some common interests outside work, such as Greek and Latin and the literature written in them, and Renaissance music. We used to sometimes play recorder together at lunch time. It was quite nice to find out that we still think alike on many things and I think neither of us was much surprised at anything that had transpired in the other's life during those decades.

Other than that, it was a day of sudden rainshowers and bursts of sunlight. I got distracted this morning upgrading OpenVMS on the Alpha machinery, which was a side track of my actual intention to install Samba on both machines. Patches were required to some OS libraries before doing this particular install. Then after I obtained all the patches and applied them, I found I could not download the current Samba version (now called Common Internet File System or CIFS according to HP.) Web site errors prevented it. The same errors also kept me from reporting the problem.

Fortunately I retried a few minutes ago and whatever the issue was, it has now been corrected.

I can't resist pointing out this article from the Chicago Tribune today. It explains very well why, as much as Amazon and Apple might like you to think otherwise, printed books are not going to just disappear and be replaced by Kindles, iPads, or other such devices.

The author also fails to mention one other aspect of "cloud media" that concerns me greatly, and that's the potential for censorship or deliberate alteration of content. Amazon has already demonstrated its ability to remove a book from user's Kindles and then put it back later. There is nothing to prevent the content from being altered before it is returned to the device (if in fact it is ever returned at all.) So you have something rather like the animal commandments that were painted on the side of the barn in George Orwell's Animal Farm. They kept somehow changing when no one was looking, and then everyone doubted their own memory that the words had been different the day before. Those were the words that eventually collapsed into the statement "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others," by which the Pigs justified their greed, dishonesty, and elitism.

In other news, we keep picking up pre-flattened bees from the kitchen floor and can't tell from whence they are coming.

Comments

[hrrunka]

It's definitely weird re-meeting folks after several decades. I think I went through the IBM Assembler-learning mill in about 1982, by which time I'd been using Z80 assembler for a couple of years.

For me, paper (I almost wrote "proper") books win on their power non-consumption, high degree of portability and relative durability. E-books are just so easy to lose...

[altivo]

It was the IBM assembler that got me started on Z80. In fact, landing that job was what raised my income to a level that permitted me to own a Z80-based system.

It hasn't often happened that I became reacquainted with someone after such a long period of time. I found it interesting that she has known our common friend, the lady who just turned 70, for some time, as a result of a common interest all three of us share. The difference is that this interest (botany and prairie restoration) has a higher priority for her, while other interests I share with Susan (birds, spinning and weaving natural fibers) are higher on my priority list so we hadn't crossed paths yet. I expect we will see each other again now that we know.

Paper and "proper" do almost go together in the case of books, don't they? XD

I use an "E-reader" device, just not a trendy one. It is convenient at times, but no substitute for printed material. Unfortunately, I think we are becoming a minority in this opinion. As printing declines (and it definitely is trending in that direction,) more and more people are accepting electronic text as the norm, with the consequences that are outlined in that article: shallow skimming of texts, or skipping for "highlights" selected by keyword. There is no overall comprehension or retention here, and therefore the integration of concepts from multiple viewpoints and sources is far less likely to take place.

[frith]

The Chicago blurb was inadequate. Awe at a spectacle of accumulated volumes does not make me confident that publishing and book sellers will continue to focus on producing paper novels and flourish while doing so. >8^( I prefer paper books and I believe the only whole book I've ever read on a screen was one of Baum's Oz books (not counting a couple of very long comics I read, such as Girl Genius, print copies of which are not available at most comic book stores).

[altivo]

Most of the article was about the failings of e-reading in terms of comprehension and absorption, not really just that opening story.

I'd not describe that undergraduate's reaction as awe. It's something more like envy, at least in my experience. I had a similar reaction as a graduate student in medieval literature when the professor who was leading our seminar on John Langland's Piers Plowman invited us to his house. We sat at a wooden library table in a room lined with bookshelves while he slid one after another of his volumes down the table for us to look at. These were the source materials that had presumably inspired Langland. Many of them were in Latin. All were printed earlier than 1600. These 400 year old books were still in excellent condition and perfectly readable, because they had been printed with vegetable oil-based inks on rag paper. The pages were neither brittle nor yellow, and the bindings were intact. Have you tried reading a CD-R written five or six years ago? Even if it has been stored carefully in a temperature controlled environment? I find that many of them have serious data errors. Magnetic media is even more fleeting.

I am not saying that e-books are bad of themselves, only that they are not reliable as long term carriers of content. Worse, studies keep finding that readers who use electronic devices tend not to read in depth or straight through, but rather will skim superficially and jump from section to section by using keyword search functions. In other words, rather then develop the comprehensive mental connections that were once the goal of formal education, they rely on external storage and mechanical recall of bits of information to allow them to get by. I maintain that in the long run this results in voters who do not take time to understand complex issues, and managers who do not grasp the implications of their decisions. In other words, not a good thing.

Publishers will continue to print paper or other tangible materials as long as there is a market for them. If we, as a culture, fall for the slick-and-easy approach of electronic devices, as seems likely right now, then printed materials may well become scarce. This is a feedback loop that I think has major implications and many of them may not be good.

[moonhare]

The author also fails to mention one other aspect of "cloud media" that concerns me greatly, and that's the potential for censorship or deliberate alteration of content.

One does wonder who could watchdog this, other than the publishers through random text comparisons. Brings to mind that scene in Star Wars where Obiwan "Lost a planet he has" after the library media has been tampered with: the point being that it would be easier to alter the source and subsequent copies electronically than with an old fashioned burning (did someone say Kindle?).

[altivo]

My thinking precisely. And the publishers can't be trusted to protect against this either. They're just as vulnerable to threats and coercion as anyone else. Some e-readers are safe from that sort of tampering, but the newer ones are not because the much-vaunted "features" introduce exactly the weaknesses that concern me.