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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • In the moment, yes.

    However, the longevity of digital data is problematic. Computers have existed for less then a 100 years, but you’d already be hard pressed to read the data off a deck of punch cards or reel of magnetic tape.

    Modern protocols and formats are much more complex, so I’d say that reading your data in 100 years will be harder then reading 100 year old data today. Have a look at a pdf in a text editor. Imagine trying to figure that out once the documentation is lost. (… or stored in the pdf)

    Without continual efforts to convert data or preserve hardware and software, the data will be lost.

    Compare that to written documents. We have writing that’s thousands of years old, and it’s still legible and understandable. We have paper documents about as old as we’ve been able to make the stuff.








  • Computers can really just do two things: copy data and do math. Anytime your your doing anything but copying data verbatim, there is math involved. Anytime your reformating, filtering or acting on data their will be some math involved.

    Take displaying an image: you can’t just copy image data to the screen, because it could have a different resolution, or color space, or be compressed. In all of those cases, you will need to do a lot of math to get things to work right.

    The exact math varies, in graphics, CAD or geospatial stuff, expect a lot of geometry. Any sort of statistics or classifier is going to involve a lot of linear algebra. Even simply storing data in s quickly accessable manner involves quite a bit of math.





  • A banana naturally has has around 15 Bq of potassium 40. Assuming a volume of 100 mL, mashed bananas have around 400 Bq/L.

    Currently, the treated water has around 250 Bq/L, around a fifth of mashed bananas. In other words, a banana smoothie could easily be more radioactive then the water as it was released.

    The banana’s potassium 40 has a half life of more then a billion years, so it’s not going anywhere, unlike the tritium who’s amount will half every 11 years. Also, potassium is concentrated by many plants and animals, while tritium is not.