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I appreciate how the article highlights the longevity of polyester-based microfilm and the simple technology (lamp and magnifier) needed to read it. But as a d

• makmanalp 8y ago
  > the fact that data can be copied perfectly, as many times as you want Tangentially, this makes me wonder: While microfilm can't be copied perfectly, isn't it true that the source quality (e.g. the crispness of the print) is vastly lower than the resolution of the medium itself? Which seems like it would imply that the "lossy" transformation might in some sense still lossless, at least for a while - like converting a high bitrate mp3 recording of a radio broadcast into a lower bitrate one. Or perhaps the kinds of loss are different. I'm sure I'm confusing a lot of ideas and butchering some terms here.
  • nayuki 8y ago
    I think you're trying to say something, but I'm getting lost in the details. Can you elaborate more on what you mean by source quality / crispness of the print / resolution of the medium itself? What items are you comparing? Please be specific.
    • CUViper 8y ago
      With arbitrary numbers: if the original paper was printed at 100dpi, and the film captured 1000dpi, then the losses from copying that film might not make a real difference in fidelity.
      • Kalium 8y ago
        Sure, so long as you assume the transfer is 100% perfect with no errors or artifacts and can make subsequent copies similarly. In practice, few physical processes can offer that level of assurance, and digital copies can.
      • kd5bjo 8y ago
        In the analog world, you have to think about signal-to-noise ratios instead of DPI. Any given copying technique will add some small but nonzero amount of randomness to the output, which destroys some information. The way digital copying gets around this problem is by having predefined signal levels that are farther apart than the vast majority of copying error, and writing a new master every time instead of the analog copy.
      • kqr 8y ago
        The first copy is unlikely to, since a random error (i.e. an unintentionally developed silver grain) will only introduce a distortion 1/10th the size of the original smallest detail. But what about after 10,000 copies? Scattering random 1/10th sized blobs all over the original details is still going to do something to the experience.
  • Kalium 8y ago
    You're right! Copying to a higher-definition medium should in theory allow for effectively lossless copies. There is a potential catch, in that analog copies will tend to introduce some amount of physical errors no matter how much the hypothetical increase in definition should allow for perfection. Subsequent copies, no matter how high their quality, will both tend to amplify these errors and introduce new ones. You get a similar result if you repeatedly re-endcode data even in high-fidelity lossy ways - each encode introduces artifacts and amplifies previous artifacts. It's an intriguing idea! Thank you for bringing it forth for discussion.
• eesmith 8y ago
  You are correct, that digital documents may be copied perfectly. However, I don't think the author "failed to emphasize" that topic because that wasn't the goal of the essay. It is part of the "Object Lesson" series - "Each Object Lessons project will start from a specific inspiration: an anthropological query, ecological matter, archeological discovery, historical event, literary passage, personal narrative, philosophical speculation, technological innovation—and from there develop original insights around and novel lessons about the object in question." - http://objectsobjectsobjects.com/about/ http://objectsobjectsobjects.com/about/ The object in question is microfilm readers, and the things we might learn from it. Not digital technology, nor the reasons why microfilm went by the wayside.
• lainga 8y ago
  I think you can copy microfilm perfectly, as long as you know the smallest distinguishable feature which the original microfilm archiving process could create. You just have to sample the microfilm at twice that spatial frequency, by the Nyquist theorem, right?
  • ssfrr 8y ago
    That only covers the errors due to aliasing. There's still going to be additive noise introduced during the transfer that will build up each time the content is transferred.
  • dTal 8y ago
    Even sampling above the Nyquist rate, you can only reconstruct a signal perfectly if the samples themselves are perfectly precise - i.e., their binary or decimal representations have infinite digits. In practice the samples are truncated to a given sampling depth, and the difference is regarded as noise. In practice though, I think you could take your idea even further into the realm of lossy compression. If you're scanning newsprint for instance, the vast majority of the page is either 1) text in a known font or 2) images rendered through halftoning, that is a regular pattern of circles wih some finite range of radii. Conceivably a system intelligent enough to recognise and encode this information might even be considered a higher fidelity scan than a simple photo, as it will repair incidental defects from the printing process.
• imhoguy 8y ago
  But digital copies ain't always perfect - you forget about bit rot [0] unfortunatelly. One bit flip on stream of compressed picture or archive distorts remaining result. Entire digital world is founded on analog physical world with all its imperfections. Of course there are solutions to mitigate them: checksuming, redundancy, error correction. But how often one checks checksum hash on copy? Edit: CRC doesn't count as it is too weak. I agree on open standards and deduplication, I hope content addresable archiving will get more mainstream, IPFS brings big hopes. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_degradation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_degradation
  • altcognito 8y ago
    > But how often one checks checksum hash on copy? Your operating system does this.
    • imhoguy 8y ago
      Only if you use ECC RAM and ZFS/Btrfs/ReFS. CRC e.g. in TCP is too weak.
      • altcognito 8y ago
        Ah this is right, I was thinking of removable media, cdrom/dvd usually do this.
        • tajen 8y ago
          USBs don’t do this. My md5 checksums fail all the time for big files on USBs. And USBs dont have SMART features.
      • zamadatix 8y ago
        Yes, if one was going to reliably archive information they wouldn't use FAT32 on a single spinning disk. Does this really need to be pointed out? The point is digital gives you ways to have perfect copies, correct loss, and the ability to transfer to the next storage medium with no decay. Things analog could never achieve.
• lb1lf 8y ago
  One major benefit of microfilm in my book is precisely the simple tech - even after the zombie apocalypse, just about anyone will be able to quickly figure out how to read what's on them. (Yes, 'zombie apocalypse' is just a placeholder for any massively disruptive event...) (That being said, digital copies would be way more useful here and now; let's do both!)
  • Animats 8y ago
    There was an effort in the 1950s and 1960s to stock major fallout shelters with a set of microfiche on how to make just about everything, along with readers that just needed sunlight. Wonder if any of those are still around. (This wasn't a joke back then. Everybody remembered the wrecked cities of WWII. They had to be built back up. You might need those instructions.)
    • blattimwind 8y ago
      > Everybody remembered the wrecked cities of WWII Is this actually a thing in American memory, given that no American city was bombed in WWII?
      • EvanAnderson 8y ago
        I think it's fair to say that American soldiers brought back those memories. My grandfather served in the Army towards the end of the conflict in Europe and, when he would speak about it, he spoke about seeing destruction. (It was not something he spoke about easily or lightly.)
      • deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      • forapurpose 8y ago
        >> Everybody remembered the wrecked cities of WWII > Is this actually a thing in American memory, given that no American city was bombed in WWII? To veer off-topic a bit, I think this is an interesting question brings up two important points: First, as the WWII generation has died out, people seem to have become less averse to war and to care less about the institutions built to prevent it (the UN, EU, international law, etc.). They were built because the survivors of WWII thought war was the worst scourge of humanity, and that another war - with ~1945 technology - could destroy civilization. Second, the U.S. experienced very little direct harm in WWII, and even the overseas casualties were orders of magnitude less than those of the European and Asian countries (e.g., the U.S. lost 200,000; the USSR lost 20 million). If the worst happens and the U.S. fights another major war, the enemy likely will be able to strike the U.S. with missiles. Even North Korea can do it to a limited degree. With the loss of the WWII generation, I think Americans have become cavalier about war, and because the WWII didn't affect the U.S. nearly as badly as the Europe and East Asia, they don't conceive of a different kind of war, such as one where missiles rain down on every American city. We can assume the Bay Area would be a priority target, for example; it's hard to imagine what that would be like; it's hard to imagine the consequences of it.
• titzer 8y ago
  > ...but never forget that what we gain is the tremendous ability to copy perfectly. Yeah, all except the first one. I'm not gonna argue with the gushing passion for all things digital in the rest of your comment, but I will first of all, point out that putting your photos, music, and videos in the cloud is absolutely not an exact copy--cloud providers don't have ToS that cover the compression that they apply to your media. There's no telling how badly they'll compress it to make room for the newest stuff years from now. Since you offered such an untempered view of digital media as the ultimate achievement of human civilization, I'd like to offer an alternative viewpoint that recognizes that digital copies reduce very deep, meaningful experiences down to very meaningless bits. That's great for newspaper articles, but it's no way to live life. Just yesterday I was sitting in the park under a tree. The winds were blowing, thousands of leaves dancing above, and distantly a church bell began tolling, it's bang-clang rolling and washing through and around the boughs, being buffeted by the wind itself. The boughs are laden with leaves and seeds, and the sound waves are muffled at a turn, coming through at a turn, as this branch shakes and wags between the bells and me. The sun is filtered and flickered, I see the veins of leaves through. The insects buzz. One shield-like bug, as thin as a blade and about the size of a fingernail, lands and waddles around my blanket, its six legs hyper-optimized by evolution. There are perhaps 10,000 such creatures in this field. A trillion generations to produce it. It starts, its wings buzzing a thousand times a second. The hundreds of thousands of blades of grass wag in waves like grain, like carpet, like kelp in a fishtank, and they too, rustle. Could digital media capture this? I move my head to the side, angle it up, cup my ears, and I sense this field...I am absolutely surrounded by information. The amount information is incredible. I could hear the scrapes of the leaves against each other and the audio shadows of them as they blow around in front of this bell! I can hear the bells harmonics, and in my mind I see the sound waves racing round its circumference, overlaid with other harmonics making it jiggle like a waterballoon. The information there is 10^30...10^40. We can't even imagine. And yet, we are told that VR and digital media will usher us into a wonderful world of entertainment. Pah! Lossless copies. Pah! We cannot even capture a millionth of something like that.
• 8bitsrule 8y ago
  I envision a transparent semi-crystalline substance that can be written to by a laser or two. With the volume of a sugar cube, perhaps, with the longevity of amber. Written down on the molecular level. Formatted to let 3D readers orient themselves to the playback, regardless of considerable distortion. Those who've seen the 60s George Pal version of "Time Machine" will remember The Traveller spinning a disk on a flat surface to activate a voiced playback. Still visionary.
• toomanybeersies 8y ago
  One big advantage of film (especially transparencies rather than negatives) though is that it can trivially be read, regardless of technology or hardware. I can view on a light table or project a photographic slide from 1935 just as easily as I can view a slide developed yesterday. On the other hand, it's not a trivial task to read a magnetic tape from the 70's. These days it's not even trivial for me to read a CD, I don't own a CD reader, and if I'm away from my desk I can't even read a USB flash drive on my Macbook Pro.
  • xamuel 8y ago
    That's important for casual readers, but less important for historical reconstruction purpose. Consider that reseachers used a micro-CT scan followed by volume cartography analysis to locate the ink within the thoroughly burnt-to-a-crisp En-Gedi scroll [1]. Compared to that, a CD is nothing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En-Gedi_Scroll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En-Gedi_Scroll
    • adrianN 8y ago
      If you don't know the encoding the CD uses, getting the bits out is the easy part.