Back in the 1960s, when I was a tween- or teen-ager, I read every copy of Analog Science Fiction/ Science Fact I could put my hands on. You can now read lots of those stories on-line (like at https://www.freesfonline.net/Magazines2.html). Some of them have stood the test of time, but some are really really bad. John Campbell, the editor of Analog back then, was racist, and also convinced that smoking tobacco was a Good Thing. Many of the stories were written (by others) to convey those ideas; it's almost unusual for lead characters not to light up a cigarette.
It will be interesting to see how much of today's scifi holds up half a century from now---not because the science is wrong, but because the moral qualities will be judged outlandish.
The sudden all encompassing popularity of smoking is one of the most astonishing things in modern history. I can think nothing that would show better the power of advertising.
Everyone knew from the start smoking is unhealthy, or at least not healthy and addictive. Nicotine probably happened to help with the new kind of stress and frustration the higher tech world caused and so it kind of answered to a real need.
Now when pretty much nobody smokes anymore, at least nobody who don't belong to underclass, it is weird reading. I remember a film of some kind of an underwater station by Cousteau and people where smoking there! A place where air for breathing is sparse if anywhere.
I think the movie you're referring to is World without Sun (1964), and the scene (which I too remember) takes place in the "Starfish House", at about ten meters depth. They were breathing ordinary air continuously pumped down to them. So there was plenty of ventilation (although given the two atmosphere pressure, the cigarettes would have burned more quickly).
Back in the day, I read the Berenstein Bears more times than I wished (my wish would have been zero times), to my kids who are probably about the same age as you.
It was such a relief when I could start reading them the Narnia Chronicles, and much later Lord of the Rings.
gnabgib points out that this same article has been posted for comment here three other times since it was written. That said, afaict no one has commented any of these times on what I'm about to say, so hopefully this will be new.
I'm a linguist, and I've worked in endangered languages and in minority languages (many of which will some day become endangered, in the sense of not having native speakers). The advantage of plain text (Unicode) formats for documenting such languages (as opposed to binary formats like Word used to be, or databases, or even PDFs) is that text formats are the only thing that will stanmd the test of time. The article by Steven Bird and Gary Simons "Seven Dimensions of Portability for Language Documentation and Description" was the seminal paper on this topic, published in 2002. I've given later conference talks on the topic, pointing out that we can still read grammars of Greek and Latin (and Sanskrit) written thousands of years ago. And while the group I led published our grammars in paper form via PDF, we wrote and archived them as XML documents, which (along with JSON) are probably as reproducible a structured format as you can get. I'm hoping that 2000 years from now, someone will find these documents both readable and valuable.
There is of course no replacement for some binary format when it comes to audio.
(By "binary" format I mean file formats that are not sequential and readily interpretable, whereas text files are interpretable once you know the encoding.)
Purely anecdotal, but I hoard a lot of personal documents (shopping receipts, confirmation emails, scans etc.) and for stuff I saved only 10 years ago, the toughest to reopen are the pure text files.
You rightly mention Unicode, as before that there was a jungle of formats. I have some in UTF-16, some in SJIS, a ton in EUC, other were already utf-8, many don't have a BOM. I could try each encoding and see what works for each of the files (except on mobile...it's just a PITA to deal with that on mobile).
But in comparison there's a set of file I never had issues opening now and then: PDFs and jpegs. All the files that my scanner produced are still readable absolutely everywhere. Even with slight bitrot they're readable, and with the current OCR processes I could probably put it all back in text if ever needed.
If I had to archive more stuff now and can afford the space, I'd go for an image format without hesitation.
PS: I'm surprised you don't mention the Unicode character limitations for minority languages or academic use. There will still be characters that either can't be represented, or don't have an exact 1 to 1 match between the code point and the representation.
BOM is normally used with UTF-16, not with UTF-8 (both of which, along with UTF-32, are encodings of Unicode).
I've worked with lots of minority languages in academic situations, but I've never run into anything that couldn't be encoded in Unicode. There's a procedure for adding characters (or blocks of characters) for characters or character sets that aren't already included. There are fewer and fewer of those. The main requirement is documentation.
There have been a lot of practical options around in the last three decades for using Unicode. To name just a few: Unicode is around since 1991. UTF-16 was supported in Windows NT in 1993. XML (1998) was specified based on Unicode code points. ...
As for many standards, the question is less what's available/supported and more what's the format actually used irl.
Half the mail I received from that period was in iso-2022 (a JIS variant), most of the rest was latin-1. I have an auto-generated mail from google plus(!) from 2015 in iso-2022-jp, I actually wonder when Google decided it was safe to fully move to utf-8.
This is all true, but I think you're too focused on your area. Finding musical notes that we can interpret correctly from an ancient civilization, would that be "text" or "binary"? I think it's a false choice.
Similarly, cave paintings express the painting someone intended to make better than a textual description of it.
Obviously this doesn't answer your question, but there are scifi stories about alien civilizations that arise on planets without heavy metals. Usually the plot revolves around their not getting past the stone age.
I have very limited experience with LLMs, and no recent experience teaching. But every time I hear about the problem of students using LLMs, I have two thoughts:
1) When they get out of school, no one can stop them from using LLMs. So preventing them from using them now is not a way to teach them how to cope in the future.
2) LLMs are (duh!) often wrong. So treat what the LLMs say as hypotheses, and teach the students how to test those hypotheses. Or if the LLMs are being used to write essays, have the students edit the output for clarity, form, etc. Exams might be given orally, or at least in a situation where the students don't have access to an LLM.
I've seen this in a few places, but it's rare because of all the energy (heat loss and energy required to drive the circulation) that gets used up when the water is recirculating but nobody is using it--which is most of the time.
I was recently in Iceland, and since a lot of heat is geothermal, recirc would probably make sense, but I can't remember having it. Maybe it's the pumping cost? Although natural convection driven by the difference in density between hot and cold water might make up for at least part of that.
Since mainframes, you say. Well, sonny, when I first learned programming on a mainframe, we had punch cards and fan-fold printouts. Nothing beats that, eh?
Nobody is forced to fund broadcasting, now that Trump has taken away NPR and PBS funding. That has nothing to do with spectrum: nada, zilch, nichts, rien, ma'yuk...
The free spectrum granted to NPR and PBS represents a huge amount of gov funding. Spectrum is worth quite a lot, it should be auctioned and proceeds used to pay down the national debt.
It's not always the case, but often verifying an answer is far easier than coming up with the answer in the first place. That's precisely the principle behind the RSA algorithm for cryptography.
It will be interesting to see how much of today's scifi holds up half a century from now---not because the science is wrong, but because the moral qualities will be judged outlandish.
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