Today has been a busy one. I spent most of the morning putting the finishing touches to the High Striker and Splat The Rat I’ve been making for Max’s school summer fete tomorrow. The Splat the Rat was quite easy (cheap boards cable-tied to a ladder and then painted), but the High Striker has been tricky. It’s only this morning that I was confident that it was going to work at all. The mechanism has been tough to perfect. I always knew I wanted to have some kind of pivot as the main mechanism, but getting it to work with the bits and bobs I had lying around the shed was hard. Eventually Christina had the great idea of moving the mechanism higher and that proved to be the turning point. The last problem of the wire snapping was solved by using a plastic piece under the Bob (my term for the metal bar that actually moves and hits the bell) rather than a metal one. Max is able to hit the bell fairly easily and this was the aim all along: for any child at the school to have the ability to hit the bell. It was never going to be very fair to set it up to be too hard. I’m sure the dings will be ringing out all afternoon tomorrow!
Christina also helped out greatly by fabricating a “rat” for the Splat the Rat game. She used an old sock of Max’s and a little sewing later and we have a small rat to use!
I’ve been thinking recently about how to set up an information source online that has reasonable perpetuity. The issue of what happens to our online presence after we die has not been raised often since not many of the pioneers of the internet and WWW have died yet! What do I mean by perpetuity anyway?! Would 100 years be enough time to hold someone’s important data online for? 200? 1000? These numbers seem ridiculous: like there’ll even be an internet by then.
So is this question pointless? I don’t think so. It may be that some data is actually not useful outside of the sphere it was intended for, e.g. someone’s blog or personal web site. What about, however, a specific piece of research or data related to something that can be used by future generations? Shouldn’t that be maintained? Presumably if it’s useful enough it would be maintained by the future generations that can use it, but I expect there to be exceptions. I might like my great-great-grandchildren to read this blog. Will it still be available to them in 50 years? Presumably, if the host maintains its presence, and that is entirely up to the shareholders! Surely there’s money to be made from someone setting up a company that does this? Call it Humanity Server, maintain it as long as possible (barring war, famine etc) and charge advertising and it would make money over time, but perhaps revenue generation over 100 years isn’t feasible!
I don’t think this problem will be solved until our species has a longer-term plan and that won’t happen until we have some things like energy security and WMD-destruction.
In the meantime I’m looking for a way to keep my data online for as long as I can. Perhaps I should look at a read-only, moon-based, solar-powered, open-source data server? How much would that cost?
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