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Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

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Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#151
post #87

I dunno, but it seems to me universities increasingly focus on press releases and marketing departments... 5D and 13.8 billion years? Phony. I know no sane scientist or enigneer that would say they use more than 3D physics. Sounds like catch phrases to sell. With such logic plain old HDD is at least 4D, because it uses CHS coordinates and magnetic orientation, to store data. To me such communication style undermines…

It’s perfectly reasonable to say you’ve increased dimensionality when you find a new physical property to store things with. If a CHS-addressed HD tomorrow starts using opacity or depth as a way to store 2 bits in each, obviously the dimensionality has increased. In ML, we regularly accept 100+d data (much higher for imaging applications). Even simple mechanical systems have large state vectors. I’m a regular critic…

There's a related Microsoft Research project https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-sil...

(I work in the same lab but on different things)

Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#153
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5D has been a term of art for years, and was not made up by this article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage

I don't know the optical storage space one way or another, so I was curious to learn more. As far as I can tell, that Wikipedia page you've linked to is solely about the same work by the same researchers as the article. Am I overlooking something? Has there been work by others using the same term? Or is the idea that the process of becoming a Wikipedia title is what makes it a term of art?

Even the Wikipedia page contains information about the original Tokio research team that only has one shared author. Furthermore, 5D is the natural extension of 3D, which was already used to distinguish it from traditional 2D (like, say, CDs).

"Term of art" might be a subjective concept, but the article making it up or not is objective.

Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#154
post #145
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they meant it was fraud, just that it's sensationalist drivel. It's choosing a way to interpret results for the sake of sounding impressive, rather than improving understanding. Choosing a temperature in order to say "this will last as long as the universe's current age", or finding ways to count extra dimensions is the behaviour of marketeers, not academics.

And yet, I pulled those claims out of the paper, which I linked. Are you suggesting Peter G. Kazansky, a research professor with over two decades of experience in optics, does not count as an academic? Or are you saying the paper doesn't make those claims? Or are you saying the paper also isn't a real academic paper and just marketeer noise? (I'm not quoting the other authors, who are of course also distinguished sch…

The complaint here appears specifically to be a lamentation that academics are behaving this way, so in attempting to prove their priors you're only strengthening the argument. Your tone seems to be adversarial, so I'm guessing that's not your goal...

Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#155
post #45

Seems a bit of a waste to dedicate an entire 360TB disc to a single text document like a bible, which is probably just a few KBs... /s More seriously, they don't talk about reading capabilities (retrieval speed etc). And what if it gets scratched? What is the error tolerance? At that density, a single speck of dust could have dramatic implications... I hope this reaches industrial viability, because we desperately ne…

> And what if it gets scratched? What is the error tolerance? At that density, a single speck of dust could have dramatic implications...

My understanding is that it doesn't matter. The data is embedded three dimensionally in glass. Assuming there was some small margin of glass around the patterned region, you could simply grind / polish off the scratches. Of course if you scratched it deep enough to destroy the data region then you'd be out of luck, but this can be made arbitrarily difficult.

Furthermore, you can arbitrarily scale error tolerance with error correcting encodings; data can be distributed, such that damage in one or a few areas is still available elsewhere, similar to RAID 5 and 6.

Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#156
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm... so the D could be for 'D'egrees of freedom? Who knows... like someone said, it is marketing, and hence a lot could be lost in translation just for easy/popular optics.

What is the difference between dimensionality and degrees of freedom? The standard definition of degrees of freedom is "number of variables that make up the state of the system" and the definition of the dimensionality of the state vector is...

There is no difference. I think people just get hung up on the word 'dimension' in the sense of degrees of freedom in a spatial state vector (to reuse your terms). Perhaps these are people who learned linear algebra only in the context of spatial dimensions / geometry and have never had to apply the concepts to any other problem domain.

Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#158
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, I pulled those claims out of the paper, which I linked. Are you suggesting Peter G. Kazansky, a research professor with over two decades of experience in optics, does not count as an academic? Or are you saying the paper doesn't make those claims? Or are you saying the paper also isn't a real academic paper and just marketeer noise? (I'm not quoting the other authors, who are of course also distinguished sch…

The complaint here appears specifically to be a lamentation that academics are behaving this way, so in attempting to prove their priors you're only strengthening the argument. Your tone seems to be adversarial, so I'm guessing that's not your goal...

"The paper isn't a real academic paper and itself also marketeer noise" is one of the options I've outlined as a debate position. But let's be clear: we started by calling research "phony" over something that would've been trivially clarified by reading a short paper. In order to even get to that point, I have to acknowledge that maybe you get to call research "phony" without seriously implying fraud. I have a hard time taking that as a serious, bona-fide argument.

Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#159
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, I pulled those claims out of the paper, which I linked. Are you suggesting Peter G. Kazansky, a research professor with over two decades of experience in optics, does not count as an academic? Or are you saying the paper doesn't make those claims? Or are you saying the paper also isn't a real academic paper and just marketeer noise? (I'm not quoting the other authors, who are of course also distinguished sch…

The complaint here appears specifically to be a lamentation that academics are behaving this way, so in attempting to prove their priors you're only strengthening the argument. Your tone seems to be adversarial, so I'm guessing that's not your goal...

While his tone seems a bit adversarial, at least he is providing relevant information to the topic instead of a generic rant. I greatly prefer the former.

Re: Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016)

#160
post #142
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, 13.8Gy is the approximate age of the universe and yes the researchers used that number. But it's not like they made this up ("phony", as you put it)! Turns out the biggest decay factor is nanograting and the biggest contributing physical quantity is temperature. They plotted what decay would look like on an Arrhenius plot. They both computed estimates and measured to confirm: the measurements are quite accurate.…

I don't think they meant it was fraud, just that it's sensationalist drivel. It's choosing a way to interpret results for the sake of sounding impressive, rather than improving understanding. Choosing a temperature in order to say "this will last as long as the universe's current age", or finding ways to count extra dimensions is the behaviour of marketeers, not academics.

The temperature at which it will last the universe's current age is 462K. This is 189 Celcius, or 372 Fahrenheit. They didn't choose an unreasonably low temperature to say it'll last the universe's age. They picked a temperature to say it'll last the universe's age even if you crank up the heat to an absurd degree. They could have given a much larger timespan if they stuck to room temperature.
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