The post is 504 now. Alternative link: http://archive.today/N9ZTb
I archived it by printing screenshots on my Brother printer, if anyone wants me to snail-mail them the original.
How to Store Data on Paper?
61–70 of 84 posts
Re: How to Store Data on Paper?
#62I 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…
I am very skeptical of this idea that people will be able to write but unable to produce useful digital computers.
I agree. When I first saw the post and the mention of humans in the reading end of the loop, I though "maybe there is a scifi story here". Hard to imagine a scenario that left humans but not many artifacts except caches of paper (or other "printed" media). Maybe a remote tribe of uncontacted people (or another species altogether) inherit the Earth after a modern world apocalypse kills off everyone in the technologically more advanced world.
A civilization starting from scratch would still need to develop a fair bit of math and tech/science sophistication before understanding and starting to use artifacts left behind. In particular optical/color on paper scanners would have been difficult before the 20th century.
Re: How to Store Data on Paper?
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
2 dots at 5 possibilities each gives 25 (5^2) 2 dots at 2 possibilities each gives 4 (2^2) They only diverge from there. Or am I doing my math wrong?
Information is ~log(possible states) according to Shannon. Log(25)/log(4) is 2.3. Among other things this definition has the nice property that two disks/pages/drives/bits together contain the sum of the capacities instead of their product.
To expand if it helps intuition: As data data density grows, the largest representable number grows exponentially.
Re: How to Store Data on Paper?
#64But how to decode it back?
Re: How to Store Data on Paper?
#65But how to decode it back?
Re: How to Store Data on Paper?
#66I'm imagining that for most of the examples you have to own a printer/scanner with better than average resolution and that the paper would only work if in pristine condition, considering how small the visual details are.
Re: How to Store Data on Paper?
#67Looking at the title I thought this articles going to be about organising personal notes in notebook
Re: How to Store Data on Paper?
#68I vote we go back to punch cards.
Re: How to Store Data on Paper?
#69I 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…
The inhernt errror resilience in charactre encoding of human languige is also an intersetnig point.
This is why, when pulling wire, I write out the numbers longhand on the end of each one. "SEVENTEEN" is a lot more smudge-resistant and unambiguous umop-apisdn than "L1".
Re: How to Store Data on Paper?
#70I have this type of issue professionally too, even though we don't use paper. For regulatory reasons, the only approved format we are allowed to use for long term archiving is PDF/A. No attachments, only pages in a single PDF document. It has shown to be an issue for including data, or spreadsheets. Most colleagues just print Excel files to a PDF that gets appended, but while it complies with the regulation it's basi…
DjVU should be the standard format.