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Thanks for doing this. Hopefully, this will help reduce the problem of the Web of Alexandria that Brett Victor talked about: 60% of my fav links from 10 yrs ag

by nrao123 11y ago

Thanks for doing this. Hopefully, this will help reduce the problem of the Web of Alexandria that Brett Victor talked about: 60% of my fav links from 10 yrs ago are 404. I wonder if Library of Congress expects 60% of their collection to go up in smoke every decade. --- For someone who's thinking about a library in every desk, going on the web today might feel like visiting the Library of Alexandria. Things didn't work out so well with the Library of Alexandria. It's interesting that life itself chose Bush's approach. Every cell of every organism has a full copy of the genome. That works pretty well -- DNA gets damaged, cells die, organisms die, the genome lives on. It's been working pretty well for about 4 billion years. We, as a species, are currently putting together a universal repository of knowledge and ideas, unprecedented in scope and scale. Which information-handling technology should we model it on? The one that's worked for 4 billion years and is responsible for our existence? Or the one that's led to the greatest intellectual tragedies in history? https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/478087637031325697 https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/478087637031325697 http://worrydream.com/TheWebOfAlexandria/ http://worrydream.com/TheWebOfAlexandria/

thaumasiotes 11y ago
> It's interesting that life itself chose Bush's approach. Every cell of every organism has a full copy of the genome. Ehhh... every cell has a full copy, but that's more of a coincidence than anything. They're not capable of using their full copy. And only the germ cells make any contribution to the genome of the next generation.
ISL 11y ago
Every cell has a full copy of the current operating plan, not the entire history of all preceding operating plans. Storing the entire commit history of our DNA would be much more space intensive.
- ddlatham 11y ago
  How much more?
  - ISL 11y ago
    Well, poking around the web, it looks like the average bacterial time-between-generations is ~0.1-10 hr, and there are ~0.1-100 mutations/generation. So, if life began 4 billion years ago, I get between 10^11 and 10^16 mutations that need tracking. The article states that there are 10^9 bases in the human genome.
    - Arelius 11y ago
      While that's a pretty significant range, it seems that we could store the entire commit-log in the same amount of DNA that 100 cells normally store.. 10,000,000 cells on the high-end. Which is still only a few milligrams of cells. Impratical of course, but interesting.

by nrao123 11y ago

thaumasiotes 11y ago

> It's interesting that life itself chose Bush's approach. Every cell of every organism has a full copy of the genome. Ehhh... every cell has a full copy, but that's more of a coincidence than anything. They're not capable of using their full copy. And only the germ cells make any contribution to the genome of the next generation.

ISL 11y ago

Every cell has a full copy of the current operating plan, not the entire history of all preceding operating plans. Storing the entire commit history of our DNA would be much more space intensive.

ddlatham 11y ago
How much more?
- ISL 11y ago
  Well, poking around the web, it looks like the average bacterial time-between-generations is ~0.1-10 hr, and there are ~0.1-100 mutations/generation. So, if life began 4 billion years ago, I get between 10^11 and 10^16 mutations that need tracking. The article states that there are 10^9 bases in the human genome.
  - Arelius 11y ago
    While that's a pretty significant range, it seems that we could store the entire commit-log in the same amount of DNA that 100 cells normally store.. 10,000,000 cells on the high-end. Which is still only a few milligrams of cells. Impratical of course, but interesting.