Dear Friends,
I hope you are well, even though this has completely changed everything and all of our plans for 2020 we can safely throw out the window.
This is a good lesson for me in flowing instead of planning. Flow like the river. Enjoy each moment. Enjoy the shape of each rock you encounter on the river bed. Flow. Nothing stops the river forever.
With Burningman cancelled this year, how can we bring that creative flow to our daily lives? So we are going to try an experiment:
My friend Cambria and I are hosting a ZoomBar this Friday after work at 8pm Eastern time, 5pm Pacific. Here’s the link. And here’s the event you can add to your calendars.
I hope to see you there. :-)
Data impermanence
We are obsessed with getting the most views, having the most profitable quarter or, for the real “long term thinkers,” having a great life. But what if we are thinking about this on way too short of a time scale?
If you want to get lots of views on your profile is it better to be the most popular or the most durable?
Would you rather be Carly Rae Jepsen with the one hit wonder “Call Me Maybe” or Shakespeare who took centuries before he got the name recognition that Carly did in a single month?
Slow and steady wins the race.
Rosetta Stone, found in the town of Rosetta, wasn’t the most interesting thing happening at the time. Probably there was a popular play or a Rosetta tabloid written on papyrus. But now, with 21 million search results on google, it has more “eyeballs” than either that long forgotten play or decayed papyrus tabloid.
Which would you rather be the author of, the Rosetta Stone or the Rosetta Tabloid?
It’s not clear that one is better than the other. Fame while you are still alive or impact on millions of people after you are dead? It depends why you want to get eyeballs on your work.
Everyone fights to be seen, both online and in personal relationships. What if there was an easier way: just make something that is valuable and durable. And then be patient.
This is one way to escape mimetic competition. If you can have a long time preference, you can do something important without any competition because no one else is doing it.
To be clear, getting eyeballs after you are dead won’t put food on your table today. It won’t inflate your ego or give you a hit of dopamine. This idea is so crazy if even one person applies this strategy I will be surprised and this article will be a success. I may not even take my own advice.
Currently there is no good permanent data solution
50 million songs were lost when MySpace migrated to a new system 17 years after it began. Most computers don’t read DVDs 20 years after they were touted as the last data solution. I lost my photos on iCloud when I (stupidly) lost my 2 factor authentication.
Digital products considered “serious” in their time can’t be expected to last even 20 years.
I came across the data durability problem as I was trying to come up with a new kind of graph where you could always find the source information. It bothers me when I click on a link and it’s broken. Or a graph simply says. “Source: World Bank.” Yes, but which data from the World Bank? How can we verify the source data forever?
Most URLs are too long and ugly to put in a graph. I had an idea: I put a shortened redirect link in each graph that went to a spreadsheet with the original data. It was in the format of link.ly/123abc. Problem solved?
Not really. Google used to have a link shortening service using goo.gl. But they stopped it. Millions of goo.gl link redirects were broken when they stopped their service after 8 years.
So how can I permanently connect a graph to the data it came from so that the information can be traced 10 or 100 years from now?
There are two requirements to being the “Rosetta Stone”: it must be useful in the future and it must be durable until that date. As we can see, a simple translation that was probably done millions of times in less durable material, has become extremely useful today. There are things you do today which, if they became durable, would be useful to people in the future. You could be the Rosetta Stone of 6000 AD! Get a time machine ’cause you’re going to go viral!
What durability options do we have?
We can carve something in stone. Luckily the Rosetta stone was found, but there were probably millions more that weren’t.
You could put it on a CD. This saves a lot of time carving. But its discoverability is even worse than a stone as now someone not only needs to be able to find the CD but also read it. If I gave you a Betamax movie could you watch it now? That’s what CDs will be like sooner than later.
Another solution is the blockchain. Many blockchains will come and go, but you can store data on bitcoin for instance which should be around for a while. This solves (or at least lessens) the problem of being discoverable. If bitcoin is still a thing in 1,000 years it will be relatively easy to find your data because it’s data will be stored on computers throughout the world. Unfortunately it is exceedingly expensive. About $22m per Gigabyte of data stored there. (Compare that to $1 for a 1GB flash drive on Amazon.) And, since bitcoin has only been around for 11 years, by the Lindy Effect, we can only reasonably expect it to be around for 11 more years.
Religious texts are another way of saving information. Historically, this is the most durable. The data isn’t transcribed faithfully, some parts are lost, like the dead sea scrolls, but the essence is carried on. The good part is that only the most important parts remain. Surprisingly the oral tradition is the most durable solution yet created. I cannot be burned, or removed by ethnic cleansing or prohibition.
I have searched around for permanent data solutions but haven’t found any. What’s your solution?
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#Graph: Why is spanish so fast?
My follow-on question is, Why are some distributions bimodal?
Thanks for reading.
Please comment, send me an email or give me a call. There’s nothing I enjoy more than bouncing around ideas with my dearest friends.
Yours,
Kyle