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How to Store Data on Paper?

monperrus.net

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Re: How to Store Data on Paper?

#51

Post by kragen »

tocs3 wrote: post #3

I have been thinking about this for a long time. Thanks for the link. The biggest advantage of character-based encodings is that they can be decoded by humans (as opposed to dot-based encodings), which means that you don’t need a camera or a scanner to recover the data. This is an interesting point. In our post apocalyptic future scholars will be using their quills to translate archives of these (in my imagination an…

If a pixel can be printed with no colors (white), cyan, magenta, yellow, cyan and magenta (blue), magenta and yellow (red), yellow and cyan (green), or all three inks (black), that's 8 colors, 3 bits per pixel, not just 3 colors. Typically laser and inkjet printers do more or less work like this, but also have a fourth ink, which is black.

I am very skeptical of this idea that people will be able to write but unable to produce useful digital computers. Computers are a mathematical discovery, not an electronic invention. Electronics makes them a thousand times faster, but a computer made out of wood, flax threads, and bent copper wire would still be hundreds of times faster than a person at tabulating logarithms, balancing ledgers, calculating ballistic trajectories, casting horoscopes, encrypting messages, forecasting finances, calculating architectural measurements, or calculating compound interest. So I think automatic computation as such is likely to survive if any human intellectual tradition does.

Re: How to Store Data on Paper?

#52

Post by 6510 »

I haven't build it because it costs a bit to much for my budget but someone some day should build the megalithic computer according to my vision: We take a river flowing down a mountain in a suitable location and carve out square canals. The AND gate is done by having a giant door attached to two blocks hollowed out from the bottom. If both blocks are submerged in water together they lift the door and water may flow into the rest of the circuitry. A grid of basins functions as the display and to store values. The input is done by putting weights onto the floating blocks thereby preventing them from lifting specific doors. I doubt it can be made large enough to run doom but it doesn't hurt to be ambitious.

Re: How to Store Data on Paper?

#55

Post by kragen »

6510 wrote: post #52

I haven't build it because it costs a bit to much for my budget but someone some day should build the megalithic computer according to my vision: We take a river flowing down a mountain in a suitable location and carve out square canals. The AND gate is done by having a giant door attached to two blocks hollowed out from the bottom. If both blocks are submerged in water together they lift the door and water may flow…

This is a brilliant idea, not because it is practical but because it is not.

Re: How to Store Data on Paper?

#56

Post by kragen »

bartvk wrote: post #14
makeworld wrote: post #6

I wonder if you could add error correction to get around OCR failures.

You could simply add a par2 file but the default setting makes it pretty big. I just tried on an 876 kB Word file. And I got a bunch of par files totaling 1158 kB. The man page says it'll correct up to 100 errors.

How well do par2 files handle insertion errors?

100 errors in an 876kB file would be about an 0.0012% errror rate. You are going to need another level of ECC before that.

Re: How to Store Data on Paper?

#58

Post by goda90 »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #48
account-5 wrote: post #21

Color Dot Encodings is interesting, you could encode data in a floor mozaic. And with my limited understanding the more colours the high the amount of data? You could encode data in monolithic structures this way. They'd last longer than paper and given future generations lots of confusion trying to figure out the meaning.

Except when the colors fade over time and people steal the purple ones to decorate their homes preferentially.

Just "backup" the data with duplication. For example you could color the floor beneath the mosaic, and the grout used for each tile, so as each layer is removed or faded, it still lasts a little longer. Duplicate your mosaic on both the floor and the ceiling. Duplicate your mosaic in multiple buildings in multiple cities.

Re: How to Store Data on Paper?

#59

Post by two_handfuls »

Joker_vD wrote: post #16
bartvk wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could simply add a par2 file but the default setting makes it pretty big. I just tried on an 876 kB Word file. And I got a bunch of par files totaling 1158 kB. The man page says it'll correct up to 100 errors.

You could replicate the Word file twice, using 1752 kB, and it'll correct up to ≈7 million one-bit errors as long as there is at most one error at three equivalent bit offsets.

And that is why for error correction, the number of error it is guaranteed to always correct is a pretty important metric too!

Re: How to Store Data on Paper?

#60

Post by IAmBroom »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #25

I pondered this from time to time and concluded that paper data storage is of very limited use, mainly because of the information density. Any remotely human-readable form is too sprase to be useful ( For this reason, paper is at best useful as a bootstrapping mechanism, which would allow readers to construct a mechanism to read more densely encoded data. My best guess is that the main storage of information in this…

> It is hard to preserve paper, unless you are willing to sacrifice its information density even more.

We have paper books from 500 years ago. Microfiche is already deteriorating.

If you keep paper dry and flat, and use pH-neutral inks and paper, it is extremely stable.

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