Getting It Down To A Science

[dr_phil_physics]

Scheduled Up

With Mrs. Dr. Phil working on classes towards a second Master's degree, we knew the annual joint project which is the Christmas/End-O-Year letter wasn't going to happen before Christmas. Actually, we alternate each year as to who writes the bulk of the letter and who revises. This was Mrs. Dr. Phil's year to write.

Production Lines

The letter got mostly written on New Year's Eve and was pretty much in good shape. Seems Mrs. Dr. Phil kept a tickle file of going's on so she'd be prepared this year. Sneaky brilliant. The paper had been ordered from Paper Direct and delivered. Now it was time to load up the HP LaserJet 4ML and go to town.

One of the problems with pretty heavily printed stiff paper is it can have problems feeding. In this case I fed every sheet in through the manual feed slot twice -- once for each side. Very staticky. But it's been this way most every year. (grin)

And Off To The Races

We made our way through about half our mailing list to ship today -- and the rest will go out tomorrow. Are we bad children who don't care about our friends and relatives? Hell no -- we've just got this down to a science. And delayed working on this until we didn't have forty-eleven other things that had to be done Right Now.

Anyway, we're done for the moment. There'll be stragglers coming through, of course. But that's fun, too.

Give And Receive

Of course we've been getting a pretty steady stream of cards and/or letters since Thanksgiving, which are always greatly appreciated. We've gotten a couple of e-cards this year, too, and we made a PDF of the letter to send to a couple of people in faraway lands.

They say letter writing is dead and that this ephemeral e-mail and blogging and texting is ruining it for future researchers. And yet... we do get some lovely letters. Maybe not the torrents people sent in the old days, but maybe you should get your heirs to back up your e-mails -- to further the research careers of some doctoral student in some future history. (grin)

Meanwhile, Happy New Year to all...

Dr. Phil

Comments

[grndexter.livejournal.com]

"They say letter writing is dead and that this ephemeral e-mail and blogging and texting is ruining it for future researchers."

Ha! "They" are Luddites who don't know what they are talking about. In former times, things that now get texted and emailed would not be written at all, but rather be said over coffee - or not at all and thus lost. Today, many people print out emails and text messages. The "paperless office" has actually caused a VAST increase in the amount of paper used by offices because tech-savy people are aware of the "persistence of media" problem. (And too there's the desire to CYOA! ;-D)

The estimated life of a CDROM is 15 years. It is short for two reasons.
1. Issue number one is that the machines required to read them will be obsolete by then. So all you have with no reader is a shiny piece of plastic with an aluminum coating. (Which strung from cords dangling over a garden make EXCELLENT scarecrows, BTW!)

2. Issue number two is handling. Most people aren't aware of the fact that the label side of the disk is actually more vulnerable to physical damage than the shiny side. All it takes is ONE scratch deep enough to penetrate the protective coating - and you're toast as the aluminum oxidizes and the disc becomes unreadable.

And too - people like to see themselves in print. They like the solidity of a piece of paper with something from their brain on it - thus offering the potential to outlast their fragile body, and perhaps be considered worthy of being saved after their body is gone. It's a pathetic shot at immortality-on-earth, but it's the best shot most folks will ever have. So they print out their little bon-mots to their friends, their "unquotable quotes," their "thoughts of the day" - and hope.

Another aspect of this is the propagation factor. Why did certain Greek plays survive to modern times? Was it because they were the best of the day? Oh, HELL no. It was because they were POPULAR - and thus there were lots of copies made of them, thus increasing the chances of a few, or one, or a part of one, of those copies persisting to modern times.

What are the chances of one copy of handwritten text making it past the estate auctioneer's staff who are cleaning up the MESS that dotty old professor left of his house? But that same text, sent to several classes of students, printed out by most of them, has a MUCH better chance of surviving for peering at by future researchers.

Fie on the Luddites. They don't know what they're talking about.

[dr-phil-physics.livejournal.com]

Ah, an excellent comment!

And you bring up the preservation issue as well, which is always something to think about with regards to what actually will survive. I have a 7-track computer tape reel from a VAX-11/750 which, even if the tape were to spool correctly, probably can't be read on any modern tape drive. If you can find a reel-to-reel computer tape drive. Oh, and some 8" floppy disks -- same problem.

I always find it amusing that when you see retrospectives on baseball, the images from the early 1970s are so crappy compared to the 50s, 60s and 80s. All has to do with the technology, how it was archived and how it has deteriorated. High acid paper was cheap for the pulps, hell on having it survive even ten years.

When you look (and listen) to Ken Burn's The Civil War, enough people fought for both sides AND wrote letters, that we have a lot of letters that have survived. But survival isn't necessarily a function of position or power. Plenty of notable people have had their papers lot in fire, flood at home, to say nothing of the general mayhem of war. For all the great letters read during The Civil War, there must've been thousands of letters which sucked and many thousands more lost to time.

I often quote Jerry Pournelle from an old Chaos Manor column from when BYTE magazine was made from dead trees: Nothing is really backed up unless it is stored on two different types of media. (and I add: stored in two different places.) (grin)

Dr. Phil