> An analog impression directly mirrors reality A clay impression directly mirrors your hand by directly mirroring reality... but its a terrible storage mechan

> An analog impression directly mirrors reality A clay impression directly mirrors your hand by directly mirroring reality... but its a terrible storage mechanism in practice. In practice, a picture of your hand, or a 3d-model of your hand, stored on a reliable hard drive or USB stick, will hold the information more reliably. Analog impressions, be they clay, or vinyl, are destroyed little-by-little each time you read from it. Simply measuring / reading from film, vinyl, and even tape, causes the magnetic fields to break, or the vinyl to warp and change shape. Digital impressions of course have the same issue. Except we have these things called "error correction codes" that can reset / wipe-out any such accumulation of errors (to a point). So long as the digital record is reread, and rewritten, before the error-correction codes wear out, you can perpetually store data without any loss. CDROMs and DVD-ROMs are written with absurdly huge amounts of error-correction codes, ensuring that they'll almost never wear out under reasonable circumstances. (Hard drives, and Flash drives have different error correction codes, but the process is the same. Modern filesystems, like ZFS, can even read, analyze, and rewrite data as it degrades automatically) -------- In contrast, I watched Star Wars maybe... 20 times? Before the tape started to significantly degrade on my old VHS player. These are technologies that can only be read dozens of times before wearing out. Not only that, but "copying" tapes, trying to preserve them, doesn't work. The act of reading innately damages the tape, so its not like you actually are "gaining more reads" by copying them. Only digital has the benefit of error correction codes that _PERFECTLY_ replicate data within a given time frame.