Perspective Squared

The most important information I have ever read online

http://divinecosmos.com/start-here/davids-blog/995-lawsuit-end-tyranny?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+DavidWilcockBlog+%28David+Wilcock+Newsletter%29

This is David Wilcock's most recent interview with Benjamin Fulford in regard to the Trillion-dollar lawsuit that could end the Babylonian system as we know it. It is perhaps the most significant and informative report that I have EVER read. If you really want to understand the world-changing events happening right now, I highly recommend that you take the time to look at this information.

Much of this is not new to me, but it contains details and connections that I had not made earlier.

On Nov. 23, 2011 a lawsuit was filed in a District Court in New York that is destined to bring down the entire Babylonian world order. It involves the Dal Bosco theft of $134 billion worth of bonds a few years ago. I had read of this when the thieves were apprehended in Italy trying to cross the border into Switzerland a few years ago, as this was reported by more than one commentator that I have followed over the years.

Little did I know that this was only the tip of a very large iceberg. Nor did I realize that this was actually a sting operation by Asian royal families to recover the gold that they had loaned the Federal Reserve System back in the 1930's. The bonds (notes on the loan) came due in 1994, but the thieves at the Fed refused to pay back the loan.

The International Court of Justice ruled against the Fed in 1998, but how does anyone collect on a debt when the US military is duped into protecting the Fed? Only now is this coming to light in a US court of law.

Who is behind this overthrow of the Fed? They are the ones whom some have called "The Kings of the East".

In The Beginning

A great rant by www.ranprieur.com Answer the questions for yourself, and share. Here.

"Why does added complexity make technological systems weaker and ecological systems stronger? How does the complexity know? Clearly we're being confused by language, and what we call "complexity" in a computer is different from what we call "complexity" in a forest. One difference is that a computer is controlled by the CPU, while a forest is decentralized; another difference is that a computer has fixed connections, while a forest can shift its connections around; another is that a computer depends on single components for most of its functions, while a forest is loaded with redundancy.

I think if you look at the system of hardware and software that runs Google, you'll find it's a lot more like a forest than like a single computer. The internet itself was designed with heavy redundancy -- it's been said that the net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. With a few more components -- long-range wi-fi, backyard solar panels, garage microprocessor fabs -- the internet could even survive a hard crash.

It's not that our tech system is too complex, but that it's complex in the wrong way. We should be designing technologies to mimic nature. And going back to Monday's subject, we should be designing societies to mimic nature. Our political and economic systems are still so amazingly primitive that they require decisions to come from the center, instead of emerging from everywhere. Empires fall, not because we're at the end of history, but because we're at the beginning."

seen2much's Rant

So the obvious has finally started to become impossible to ignore, as I have stated over and over that it would...

So, in that tradition, I will fill you all in at what so many of you obviously miss...

The collapse of our empire will end our planetary warmongering. The drone attacks will stop, troops will be brought home (or left stranded if the collapse is sudden enough..), our navy will drastically shrink ending our easy power projection, as will our air force.. The drastic reductions will be billed as "movements toward efficiency and modernization", truth is the only "movements" going on will be the death-crap our empire is taking during the final death-spasms..

So, defense spending cuts are coming no matter what... Good riddance to the death machine.

Social security is collapsing, as is all the other "chicken in every pot" socialist initiatives that idiot FDR foisted upon us.. Forced wealth distribution has been and always will be ROBBERY, and people will always find ways to deal with robbers, peaceful and otherwise.

We could have unwound this at a reasonable pace, immediately and drastically slashed the defense budget, took the savings and used them for infrastructure repair and advancement, as well as carefully weaning our population off the government cheese addiction, educating them for a more productive and self-reliant future... No, you had that choice and laughed him of the stage and shut him out out of the debates in 2008...

Now you will endure the consequences of willful ignorance:

First, The aforementioned military collapse, the powers that be will hold the military up as long as possible, for they are all that stand between them and the angry mobs that intend to take them to the nearest lamp posts.

SO.. The FIRST stuff that will get drastically slashed when the economic hammer comes down (when people finally realize that the "impossible" is now reality, that default is inevitable.), will be the "social safety net". Hospitals will shut down in droves, welfare checks stop coming, granny will have to pay for her own oxygen, millions will lose access to medications. That's right, you all will have to go cold turkey and figure out how to survive, more than a few of you will be priced out of survival.. You will get plenty of warning, students protesting impossibly high tuition combined with severe reductions in student aid and loan availability, skyrocketing hyperinflation, huge public worker lay offs and cut backs...

Then, some of you will scream for more socialism, but you who do are too stupid to see that there is nothing left to give out, no magic hat that springs forth with government cheese eternal... You will attempt to take from those that have, you will instead induce capital flight as well as passive and violent resistance... Those who produce will join with others who produce, and work together to resist and neutralize you takers.

The country will fracture, breaking along every line you can conceive, but mostly ideological lines. foreign influence will be at a minimum, as they will actually have larger problems than us. China will implode, right after it violently expands in asia, Russia will hold as long as Putin is alive, and he looks pretty healthy. Europe will devolve into the tribal mess it always was. The developing countries will be knocked back severely, war will be everywhere and mostly internal.

World war 3 is not completely off the table. If WW3 happens, we will be extinct when it ends. I think WW3 has less than a 50% chance of happening, but never underestimate the hateful desperation of our "leaders" if they cannot maintain their privileged state.

So there it is, the cliff notes of the next 40 years of the 21st century.. Most of you reading this will be compost by 2020. All of you will lose more than you can bear to lose. All of us are to blame, as much for how we lived as well as what we ignored. I'm just as guilty as you, I am no better than anybody else on this, I too may not live to see 2020, and if I do, I probably won't want to live to see 2021.

These are the wages of willful ignorance.

Reality will no longer be ignored.

Got Republic?

TOO Late?

Maybe I need to change the name of this blog. I was watching the movie with the line "you can't handle the truth!" with my brother-in-law the other day. After the defendent's speech he says, "I agree with what he said". He was refering to the part about "unless you are willing to pick up a weapon and stand on the wall, don't question me about how I do my job". I had to leave.

http://vodpod.com/watch/4756837-you-cant-handle-the-911-truth-dr-paul-craig-roberts-explains-

The Panic Is ON

What this country is coming to
I sure would like to know
If they don’t do something bye and bye
The rich will live and the poor will die
Doggone, I mean the panic is on!
–Hezekiah Jenkins

As the Great Depression of the 1930’s was getting underway, President Herbert Hoover refused to acknowledge it. In the weeks following the events of Black Tuesday, Hoover called the economy “fundamentally sound.” Months later, he still insisted that the strength of the American economy was “unimpaired.” However, by 1931 he could no longer hide the truth. With the economy in shambles, Hoover was forced to declare that America was indeed in a ‘depression’. He chose the word ‘depression’ because he believed it to somewhat innocuous and far less provocative than terms like ‘panics’ or ‘crises’ that had previously been used to refer to significant economic downturns.

That same semantic game is being played on us today. What we now call a ‘recession’ is what was known as a ‘depression’ back in the 1930’s. As economist John Williams explains:

“The Great Depression was one that was so severe that in the post-World War II era, those looking at economic cycles tried to come up with a euphemism for “depression.” They didn’t want to create the image of or remind people of the 1930s. Basically, they called economic downturns recessions, and most people think of a depression now as a severe recession.”(1)

The lies propagated by our government and their paid shills are perhaps their greatest crime. Deceiving the people concerning the scope and magnitude of our financial crisis denies them the opportunity to prepare for the tough days ahead. Even the word depression does not fully impress upon the people the serious predicament we now face. Perhaps its time we do remind people of the 1930’s and draw parallels between those tragic times and our current situation.

Today’s unemployment rate is fast approaching the worst levels seen since the Great Depression. The official unemployment rate (U3) released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics is currently at 9.9%. This is the number often reported by the mainstream media for public consumption but is far removed from reality.

To get closer to the real number we must consult the (U6) figure that is often touted as ‘true unemployment’. This figure adds into the equation those who fall under the contemporary definition of ‘discouraged worker’ and those who can only find ‘part-time’ work. That number puts the ‘true unemployment’ rate at 17.2%. But wait, there’s more!

Today’s definition of a discouraged worker is one who has not found work within the last year. Prior to 1994, a discouraged worker was defined as one who had not found work within the last month. That’s a big discrepancy. If we add those lost souls back into the equation, we come up with a more realistic unemployment rate of right around 22%. That’s just three clicks shy of the 25% often cited for the worst levels of the Great Depression in 1933. That 25% unemployment figure was reflective of all workers both on and off the farm.

Many economists, intent on disproving any comparison of today’s unemployment with that of the ‘Great Depression’, will often site the non-farm unemployment figure of 34%. But it should be pointed out that during that time, 27% of America’s employed worked on the farm. Today that number is only 2%.

Unlike today, The Great Depression of the 1930’s was deflationary. The Consumer Price Index was at 17.3% when it began in 1929. By 1933 it was down to 12.6%. In other words, as the depression progressed, the cost of things dropped; what cost $1.00 in 1929 only cost 73 Cents in 1933.(2)

Not so with the depression of today. Ours is an inflationary depression that is fast becoming hyperinflationary. Hyperinflation comes when the increase in the money supply causes prices to rise so rapidly that the highest denominated bank note becomes less valuable than toilet paper. This is being facilitated by industry bailouts, unnecessary wars, foreign aid to Israel and entitlement programs that were not factors in 1933.

Since 1933, inflation has increased 1,627.23%. To calculate its decimal equivalent you need to move the decimal point two places to the left. So 1,627.23%=16.2723 in decimals. This means that what cost $1.00 in 1933 costs approximately $16.27 today.(3)

The average American’s annual income in 1933 was $1,550.00. Today, that would be the equivalent of $25,218.00. According to the last Bureau of Labor Statistics report for 2009(4), the average American’s annual income was $28,592.00 (mid range between highest and lowest by State for 1 person). This may seem like we’re ahead of the game compared to the Great Depression. However, when you consider that the lowest bracket of income tax was levied at 4% in 1933 compared to 15% in 2010, you can see that we are almost on par. But you also must consider the plethora of other taxes and deductions that have since been siphoned out of the average American’s paycheck. Contemporary sales taxes and compulsory enrollments like mandatory insurance (both auto and health) must also be added into the equation to get a better gauge as to where we are now compared to days gone by.(5)

Prices of things, on average, were much more affordable back during the Great Depression than they are now. Here are some basic items for comparison:

Cost of a new house 1933: $5,750.00 (equivalent to $93,565.72 in 2010)

Cost to rent a house in 1933: $18.00 per month (equivalent to $292.00 in 2010)

Brand New Plymouth in 1933: $445.00 (equivalent to $7241.17 in 2010)

Gallon of gas in 1933: 10 Cents (equivalent to $1.62 in 2010)

Loaf of Bread in 1933: 7 Cents (equivalent of $1.13 in 2010)

1 Lb. Of Hamburger Meat in 1933: 11 Cents (equivalent to $1.79 in 2010)

Can of Campbell’s Vegetable Soup in 1933: 10 Cents (equivalent to $1.62 in 2010)

Dozen Eggs in 1933: 5 Cents (equivalent to 81 Cents today)

Take the equivalent monetary values listed above for 2010 and do your own research. Can you buy the same items today for that little cash? According to the 2009 census, the cost to rent a house is approximately $775.00 per month, on average. The cost of even the cheapest automobile is in the tens of thousands and I don’t need to tell you about everyday household goods. Consider these the good times. When hyperinflation sets in, these prices will soar. We don’t live today like they did back in the 1930’s when people were, at most, one generation removed from the farm. As was pointed out previously, 27% of American workers made their livings on the farm and were able to provide many of their own basic needs from that culture. Today, that number is only 2%.

Despite this data, deniers will refuse to believe that they are living through a depression. Some need tangible, salient evidence. They need to feel the depression, or at least have a cognitive reference point that coincides with the black and white images they have come to associate with a depression. Where are the soup lines? Where are the shantytowns? Where are the armies of disheveled hobos playing harmonica as they roast a can of beans over a roadside campfire?

The complexion of today’s depression is certainly different from the hard luck images of the 1930’s. But these are just cosmetic differences. When you strip away the veneer, you find that we are afflicted with the same problems as they were back then. Today’s soup lines come in the form of food stamps. Public housing and tent cities are today’s shantytowns. Hobos are now called ‘the homeless’, and many of them are disappearing from the streets and ending up in a burgeoning penal system that swallows them up on petty drug charges.

There are other factors that keep this depression suppressed in the minds of the American public. The most significant of these is unemployment benefits. This did not exist during the Great Depression. When you were out of work, you were out of money. This hit people immediately and many had no way to obtain even the most basic subsistence to feed their families. The welfare system is another contemporary mechanism that was not in place during that time. Right now, these are perhaps the only two things that distance the human suffering from our true economic reality. But they weren’t built to last, and the only reason they have lasted this long is because the government has a vested interest in keeping these entitlement programs going. Providing basic subsistence keeps the people dependent and apathetic to their plight. As long as people have a roof over their head and enough to eat they will allow those who provide those things to take everything else they have.

The Federal infusions of funds into the unemployment and welfare systems will continue only for as long as it takes the bankers to fully rob the American people of everything they own. In the meantime, unemployment will continue to rise and the depression will deepen to levels unimaginable as the unsuspecting unemployment recipient spends his jobless days as if he were on a paid vacation. He’ll waste his checks on beer and porn and stretch out on the couch until the final week. Then he’ll get serious, only to find that things are not as rosy as the liars on CNBC promised they’d be.

Unlike 1933, our depression comes at a time when there is increased foreign war spending and many of our potentially unemployed youths are serving overseas. Imagine what would happen to the unemployment rate if these wars came to an end. Then imagine what would happen if unemployment benefits and welfare entitlement programs ceased to exist. When you do, you can understand why all of these things continue to be funded.

This is a robbery, and the hostages are being held in the back of the store learning to love their captors. Most Americans are under a spell best described as the ‘Stockholm Syndrome’. In psychology, Stockholm syndrome is a term used to describe a paradoxical psychological phenomenon wherein hostages express adulation and have positive feelings towards their captors that appear irrational in light of the danger or risk endured by the victims. The syndrome is named after the Normrmalmstorg robbery of Kreditbanken at Norrmalmstorg in Stockholm, in which the bank robbers held bank employees hostage from August 23 to August 28, 1973. In this case, the victims became emotionally attached to their captors, and even defended them after they were freed from their six-day ordeal.(6)

Until the American people snap out of their trance, they will refuse to believe that they are in a depression, recession, panic or crisis. To them, it will be a loving embrace by a charismatic savior. Only until they feel the peircing bite of cold air on their necks and the pains of an empty stomach will they finally come around to the realization that the panic is not coming—but that the panic is on!

http://revoltoftheplebs.wordpress.com/2010/05/13/the-panic-is-on/#comment-536

So Much Insanity

March 17, 2010
Doug McIntosh
© SteveQuayle.com

So much insanity; so much to comment on. I am in a target rich environment for stupidity, arrogance, corruption and fraud. Since there is so much of it, I am sometimes at a loss about what to write about. It is like I have turned on a Cable Channel, the Stupid Channel, all stupidity and all the time. Still, the stupidity levels in both American and global politics, economics and popular culture are simply overwhelming to me. Perhaps, I have lived too long, or at least I have seen to much. I remember what America used to be like, not perfect by any means, but at least a place where honorable men and women tried to do the right thing. America used to be a place where if you played by the rules, you at least had a shot. In modern America the game is rigged. It is rigged by corrupt politicians and regulators, criminal bankers and fraudulent stock brokers. The middle class is looked upon the same way a wolf pack eyeballs a flock of sheep. The system is composed of economic rapists and child molesters, using the full force of the law, politics and the media to engage in their perverted pastimes.

I weep for the American Republic, murdered in October 2008 by the first bailout votes, and I weep for the American people, but I do not weep for the American system of economic oligarchy and political fascism. In many ways, I say let it collapse. And yes Virginia, I really do want to see the head of Goldman Sacks led off in chains to either a swift execution, or a life of breaking rocks in a Louisiana swamp. There will be no economic recovery until there is a moral recovery, a moral recovery based upon criminal fraud charges against our leading government regulators, politicians, bankers and Wall Street firms. Since that is unlikely, I will settle for the economic collapse. Like Samson, I am perfectly willing to bring the temple down on the heads of our Dagon worshipping elite. After all, people like me have nothing left to lose. The most dangerous people are not those who have everything to gain: the most dangerous people are those who have nothing left to lose. We are now a society with tens of millions of people, armed people, who have nothing left to lose. Our NWO elite should bear that in mind. The basic problem with our elite is they don't know when to stop. I think that is because we haven't really held them accountable for their economic and political crimes. Hopefully, we can do that without a wave of violence, although I am no longer sure of that. It may be the popular rage explodes like the lid of a superheated pressure cooker. It will be unfortunate if that happens, but I can certainly understand why that will happen.

As usual, my first odds and end must begin with our esteemed Marxist Dictator Obama the First and his fun and games. The "change we can believe in" candidate, who is in effect a Clinton Two administration, offers us a "change we can't see" President. Obama has merged the corruption and sleaze of the Clinton's with his own oversized ego and arrogance to form the political version of a jackass. This is about the best description of the Obama administration I can think of. Who are these people and how did they get in power? Can a nation go temporarily insane? It's the best explanation for Obama being elected I can think of. McCain being the other.

In Obama's version of Sherman's March to the Sea, the so called Health Care debate, we see his true form revealed. The whole point of Obama's health care plan has nothing to do with Health Care. The main point of Obama's Health Care plan is to enact it and collect taxes for two or three years before any benefits happen. If there is a more cynical way to secretly raise taxes now, while delaying any potential benefit for several years, I have not seen it. Obama and his ilk are using the Health Care plan to inflict a tax increase without benefits. In all the discussion over his Health Care Plan this seems to fall between the cracks. It is not a Health Care Plan: IT IS A TAX INCREASE. Nothing more; nothing less. Viewed in this light, I can understand Obama's obsession with it. Obama plans to use the revenues generated by this plan to cover the 1.5 TRILLION yearly deficits he is running.

It also has to be one of the bitterest ironies that our warmonger President Obama, who is following the exact policies of Bush Jr.. his own party savaged for years, is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. I am sure the deformed babies in Iraq and Afghanistan are impressed. If you take munitions and you coat them with depleted uranium, and then you fire or drop it on a country, you will get radioactive dust. Our warmonger President can't be bothered with things like that. It is amazing to me to watch the same liberal morons, who rioted whenever Bush came to Portland, not say a peep when Obama sends an additional two or three divisions to Afghanistan. The arrogance and hypocrisy of both the Democrats and Republicans is amazing to me. I really think they don't care anymore. They are so full of themselves at this point that quaint concepts like truth, honor and the oath they took to uphold the American Constitution mean nothing to them. They have deluded themselves to the point they don't even realize what they are doing. In fact, I think they even believe their own lies at this point. When I look at Obama, Peloski, Reid or McCain I see what the longshoreman Eric Hoffer wrote about in his book "The True Believer." The intensity of their drive to pass Health Care for instance, shows me we are not dealing with rational people, but fanatics instead. A nation led by fanatics into a Marxist wilderness of enemies of the state, increasing government control of all aspects of daily life; finally, the increasing criminalization of political dissent. Go back and read my essay, "Welcome to Ubangastan" and look at the predictions I made there; then tell me I am wrong.

If all this weren't bad enough, we have the whole debt issue. One of the things in the economic sphere that still amazes me is the simple fact modern economies are based on debt. All true economic growth comes from productivity, either from exploiting natural resources, farms, mining, timber, or from producing products people need, or from providing services they need.. In modern America economic growth comes from distributing imported economic goods, rigged stock markets, overbuilding real estate and bloated health care. America doesn't actually produce anything anymore, we merely play games with our money, take our pills and ship stuff around. The reason we are in such bad shape economically is we have built our economic house upon a quicksand of debt. Debt is not money. Until we realize this, there is truly no hope for us.

The main reason we are screwed economically speaking is that we have made no attempt to squeeze the debt out of our government, our corporations or private individuals. Under our fractional reserve banking system, it is impossible to pay back the amounts owed, since the amounts are so vast relative to our actual principal. The other thing we need to understand is we cannot pay off the Federal Deficit, anymore than we can fund the $60 TRILLION in unfunded government liabilities. Since we cannot pay our debt off, we only have two choices. The first is to keep juggling year by year until the whole economic system crashes. The other is to default on our debts and start over. Both will lead to an economic catastrophe which I can only call a hyper depression. I will also add that the foreigners we owe some of this debt too will not quietly accept any such default. They will take concrete steps to get their money back, either by a military invasion or a direct seizure of our physical assets. If you view both Clinton and Obama with their land grabs you begin to understand what I am talking about. For instance, the reason the oil in Montana isn't being developed is simple. It is being held as collateral for foreign investors when the US government defaults on our debt. When, not if, the USA defaults on its debts, the foreigners will simply take out their pound of flesh in hard, physical assets, like farmland, ports, airports etc. Mark my words, we will see the USA return to its status as a colony when that happens.

Well, enough ranting and raving for today. The sun rises on both the wicked and the just. I still think the wicked get sunburned more than the just, but like they say, honesty pays, but dishonesty pays quarterly dividends. Just ask any whore on Wall Street, or any of our politicians in that Sodom on the Potomac called Washington DC. Evil struts the land like a peacock, unafraid, insolent and bellowing, at least until the people turn it into stew. Personally, I am developing a taste for Peacock stew.

All links to this article must include link to www.stevequayle.com/ Copyright reserved

Avoiding a Digital Dark Age

Data longevity depends on both the storage medium and the ability to decipher the information

Kurt D. Bollacker

When I was a boy, I discovered a magnetic reel-to-reel audio tape recorder that my father had used to create “audio letters” to my mother while he was serving in the Vietnam War. To my delight (and his horror), I could listen to many of the old tapes he had made a decade before. Even better, I could make recordings myself and listen to them. However, all of my father’s tapes were decaying to some degree—flaking, stretching and breaking when played. It was clear that these tapes would not last forever, so I copied a few of them to new cassette tapes. While playing back the cassettes, I noticed that some of the sound quality was lost in the copying process. I wondered how many times I could make a copy before there was nothing left but a murky hiss.

A decade later in the 1980s I was in high school making backups of the hard drive of my PC onto 5-¼-inch floppy disks. I thought that because digital copies were “perfect,” and I could make perfect copies of perfect copies, I couldn’t lose my data, except by accident. I continued to believe that until years later in college, when I tried to restore my backup of 70 floppy disks onto a new PC. To my dismay, I discovered that I had lost the floppy disk containing the backup program itself, and thus could not restore my data. Some investigation revealed that the company that made the software had long since gone out of business. Requests on electronic bulletin board systems and searches on Usenet turned up nothing useful. Although all of the data on them may have survived, my disks were useless because of the proprietary encoding scheme used by my backup program.

The Dead Sea scrolls, made out of still-readable parchment and papyrus, are believed to have been created more than 2,000 years ago. Yet my barely 10-year-old digital floppy disks were essentially lost. I was furious! How had the shiny new world of digital data, which I had been taught was so superior to the old “analog” world, failed me? I wondered: Had I had simply misplaced my faith, or was I missing something?

Over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st, an increasing proportion of the information we create and use has been in the form of digital data. Many (most?) of us have given up writing messages on paper, instead adopting electronic formats, and have exchanged film-based photographic cameras for digital ones. Will those precious family photographs and letters—that is, email messages—created today survive for future generations, or will they suffer a sad fate like my backup floppy disks? It seems unavoidable that most of the data in our future will be digital, so it behooves us to understand how to manage and preserve digital data so we can avoid what some have called the “digital dark age.” This is the idea—or fear!—that if we cannot learn to explicitly save our digital data, we will lose that data and, with it, the record that future generations might use to remember and understand us.

Save Our Bits!
The general problem of data preservation is twofold. The first matter is preservation of the data itself: The physical media on which data are written must be preserved, and this media must continue to accurately hold the data that are entrusted to it. This problem is the same for analog and digital media, but unless we are careful, digital media can be more fragile.

The second part of the equation is the comprehensibility of the data. Even if the storage medium survives perfectly, it will be of no use unless we can read and understand the data on it. With most analog technologies such as photographic prints and paper text documents, one can look directly at the medium to access the information. With all digital media, a machine and software are required to read and translate the data into a human-observable and comprehensible form. If the machine or software is lost, the data are likely to be unavailable or, effectively, lost as well.

Preservation
Unlike the many venerable institutions that have for centuries refined their techniques for preserving analog data on clay, stone, ceramic or paper, we have no corresponding reservoir of historical wisdom to teach us how to save our digital data. That does not mean there is nothing to learn from the past, only that we must work a little harder to find it. We can start by briefly looking at the historical trends and advances in data representation in human history. We can also turn to nature for a few important lessons.

The earliest known human records are millennia-old physical scrapings on whatever hard materials were available. This medium was often stone, dried clay, bone, bamboo strips or even tortoise shells. These substances were very durable—indeed, some specimens have survived for more than 5,000 years. However, stone tablets were heavy and bulky, and thus not very practical.

Possibly the first big advance in data representation was the invention of papyrus in Egypt about 5,500 years ago. Paper was lighter and easier to make, and it took up considerably less space. It worked so well that paper and its variants, such as parchment and vellum, served as the primary repositories for most of the world’s information until the advent of the technological revolution of the 20th century.

Technology brought us photographic film, analog phonographic records, magnetic tapes and disks, optical recording, and a myriad of exotic, experimental and often short-lived data media. These technologies were able to represent data for which paper cannot easily be used (video, for example). The successful ones were also usually smaller, faster, cheaper and easier to use for their intended applications. In the last half of the 20th century, a large part of this advancement included a transition from analog to digital representations of data.

Even a brief investigation into a small sampling of information-storage media technologies throughout history quickly uncovers much dispute regarding how long a single piece of each type of media might survive. Such uncertainty cannot be settled without a time machine, but we can make reasonable guesses based on several sources of varying reliability. If we look at the time of invention, the estimated lifespan of a single piece of each type of media and the encoding method (analog or digital) for each type of data storage (see the table at right), we can see that new media types tend to have shorter lifespans than older ones, and digital types have shorter lifespans than analog ones. Why are these new media types less durable? Shouldn’t technology be getting better rather than worse? This mystery clamors for a little investigation.

To better understand the nature of and differences between analog and digital data encoding, let us use the example of magnetic tape, because it is one of the oldest media that has been used in both analog and digital domains. First, let’s look at the relationship between information density and data-loss risk. A standard 90-minute analog compact cassette is 0.00381 meters wide by about 129 meters long, and a typical digital audio tape (DAT) is 0.004 meters wide by 60 meters long. For audio encodings of similar quality (such as 16 bit, 44.1 kilohertz for digital, or 47.6 millimeters per second for analog), the DAT can record 500 minutes of stereo audio data per square meter of recordable surface, whereas the analog cassette can record 184 minutes per square meter. This means the DAT holds data about 2.7 times more densely than the cassette. The second table (right) gives this comparison for several common consumer audio-recording media types. Furthermore, disk technologies tend to hold data more densely than tapes, so it is no surprise that magnetic tape has all but disappeared from the consumer marketplace.

However, enhanced recording density is a double-edged sword. Assume that for each medium a square millimeter of surface is completely corrupted. Common sense tells us that media that hold more data in this square millimeter would experience more actual data loss; thus for a given amount of lost physical medium, more data will be lost from digital formats. There is a way to design digital encoding with a lower data density so as to avoid this problem, but it is not often used. Why? Cost and efficiency: It is usually cheaper to store data on digital media because of the increased density.

A possibly more important difference between digital and analog media comes from the intrinsic techniques that comprise their data representations. Analog is simply that—a physical analog of the data recorded. In the case of analog audio recordings on tape, the amplitude of the audio signal is represented as an amplitude in the magnetization of a point on the tape. If the tape is damaged, we hear a distortion, or “noise,” in the signal as it is played back. In general, the worse the damage, the worse the noise, but it is a smooth transition known as graceful degradation. This is a common property of a system that exhibits fault tolerance, so that partial failure of a system does not mean total failure.

Unlike in the analog world, digital data representations do not inherently degrade gracefully, because digital encoding methods represent data as a string of binary digits (“bits”). In all digital symbol number systems, some digits are worth more than others. A common digital encoding mechanism, pulse code modulation (PCM), represents the total amplitude value of an audio signal as a binary number, so damage to a random bit causes an unpredictable amount of actual damage to the signal.

Let’s use software to concoct a simulated experiment that demonstrates this difference. We will compare analog and PCM encoding responses to random damage to a theoretically perfect audiotape and playback system. The first graph in the third figure (above) shows analog and PCM representations of a single audio tone, represented as a simple sine wave. In our perfect system, the original audio source signal is identical to the analog encoding. The PCM encoding has a stepped shape showing what is known as quantization error, which results from turning a continuous analog signal into a discrete digital signal. This class of error is usually imperceptible in a well-designed system, so we will ignore it for now.

For our comparison, we then randomly damage one-eighth of the simulated perfect tape so that the damaged parts have a random amplitude response. The second graph in the third figure (above) shows the effect of the damage on the analog and digital encoding schemes. We use a common device called a low-pass filter to help minimize the effect of the damage on our simulated output. Comparing the original undamaged audio signal to the reconstructions of the damaged analog and digital signals shows that, although both the analog and digital recordings are distorted, the digital recording has wilder swings and higher error peaks than the analog one.

But digital media are supposed to be better, so what’s wrong here? The answer is that analog data-encoding techniques are intrinsically more robust in cases of media damage than are naive digital-encoding schemes because of their inherent redundancy—there’s more to them, because they’re continuous signals. That does not mean digital encodings are worse; rather, it’s just that we have to do more work to build a better system. Luckily, that is not too hard. A very common way to do this is to use a binary-number representation that does not mind if a few bits are missing or broken.

One important example where this technique is used is known as an error correcting code (ECC). A commonly used ECC is the U.S. Postal Service’s POSTNET (Postal Numeric Encoding Technique), which represents ZIP codes on the front of posted envelopes. In this scheme, each decimal digit is represented as five binary digits, shown as long or short printed bars (right). If any single bar for any decimal digit were missing or incorrect, the representation would still not be confused with that of any other digit. For example, in the rightmost column of the table, the middle bar for each number has been erased, yet none of the numbers is mistakable for any of the others.

Although there are limits to any specific ECC, in general, any digital- encoding scheme can be made as robust as desired against random errors by choosing an appropriate ECC. This is a basic result from the field of information theory, pioneered by Claude Shannon in the middle of the 20th century. However, whichever ECC we choose, there is an economic tradeoff: More redundancy usually means less efficiency.

Nature can also serve as a guide to the preservation of digital data. The digital data represented in the DNA of living creatures is copied into descendents, with only very rare errors when they reproduce. Bad copies (with destructive mutations) do not tend to survive. Similarly, we can copy digital data from medium to medium with very little or no error over a large number of generations. We can use easy and effective techniques to see whether a copy has errors, and if so, we can make another copy. For instance, a common error-catching program is called a checksum function: The algorithm breaks the data into binary numbers of arbitrary length and then adds them in some fashion to create a total, which can be compared to the total in the copied data. If the totals don’t match, there was likely an accidental error in copying. Error-free copying is not possible with analog data: Each generation of copies is worse than the one before, as I learned from my father’s reel-to-reel audiotapes.

Because any single piece of digital media tends to have a relatively short lifetime, we will have to make copies far more often than has been historically required of analog media. Like species in nature, a copy of data that is more easily “reproduced” before it dies makes the data more likely to survive. This notion of data promiscuousness is helpful in thinking about preserving our own data. As an example, compare storage on a typical PC hard drive to that of a magnetic tape. Typically, hard drives are installed in a PC and used frequently until they die or are replaced. Tapes are usually written to only a few times (often as a backup, ironically) and then placed on a shelf. If a hard drive starts to fail, the user is likely to notice and can quickly make a copy. If a tape on a shelf starts to die, there is no easy way for the user to know, so very often the data on the tape perishes silently, likely to the future disappointment of the user.

Comprehensibility
In the 1960s, NASA launched Lunar Orbiter 1, which took breathtaking, famous photographs of the Earth juxtaposed with the Moon. In their rush to get astronauts to the Moon, NASA engineers created a mountain of magnetic tapes containing these important digital images and other space-mission-related data. However, only a specific, rare model of tape drive made for the U.S. military could read these tapes, and at the time (the 1970s to 1980s), NASA had no interest in keeping even one compatible drive in good repair. A heroic NASA archivist kept several donated broken tape drives in her garage for two decades until she was able to gain enough public interest to find experts to repair the drives and help her recover these images.

Contrast this with the opposite problem of the analog Phaistos Disk (above right), which was created some 3,500 years ago and is still in excellent physical condition. All of the data it stores (about 1,300 bits) have been preserved and are easily visible to the human eye. However, this disk shares one unfortunate characteristic with my set of 20-year-old floppy disks: No one can decipher the data on either one. The language in which the Phaistos disk was written has long since been forgotten, just like the software to read my floppies is equally irretrievable.

These two examples demonstrate digital data preservation’s other challenge—comprehensibility. In order to survive, digital data must be understandable by both the machine reading them and the software interpreting them. Luckily, the short lifetime of digital media has forced us to gain some experience in solving this problem—the silver lining of the dark clouds of a looming potential digital dark age. There are at least two effective approaches: choosing data representation technologies wisely and creating mechanisms to reach backward in time from the future.

Make Good Choices …
In order to make sure digital data can be understood in the future, ideally we should choose representations for our data for which compatible hardware and software are likely to survive as well. Like species in nature, digital formats that are able to adapt to new environments and threats will tend to survive. Nature cannot predict the future, but the mechanism of mutation creates different species with different traits, and the fittest prevail.

Because we also can’t predict the future to know the best data-representation choices, we try to do as nature does. We can copy our digital data into as many different media, formats and encodings as possible and hope that some survive.

Another way to make good choices is to simply follow the pack. A famous example comes from the 1970s, when two competing standards for home video recording existed: Betamax and VHS. Although Betamax, by many technical measures, was a superior standard and was introduced first, the companies supporting VHS had better business and marketing strategies and eventually won the standards war. Betamax mostly fell into disuse by the late 1980s; VHS survived until the mid-2000s. Thus if a format or media standard is in more common use, it may be a better choice than one that is rare.

… Or Fake It!
Once we’ve thrown the dice on our data-representation choices, is there anything else we can do? We can hope we will not be stuck for decades, like our NASA archivist, or left with a perfectly readable but incomprehensible Phaistos disk. But what if our scattershot strategy of data representation fails, and we can’t read or understand our data with modern hardware and software? A very common approach is to fake it!

If we have old digital media for which no compatible hardware still exists, modern devices sometimes can be substituted. For example, cheap and ubiquitous optical scanners have been commonly used to read old 80-column IBM punchcards. This output solves half of the problem, leaving us with the task of finding hardware to run the software and interpret the data that we are again able to read.

In the late 1950s IBM introduced the IBM 709 computer as a replacement for the older model IBM 704. The many technical improvements in the 709 made it unable to directly run software written for the 704. Because customers did not want either to lose their investment in the old software or to forgo new technological advances, IBM sold what they called an emulator module for the 709, which allowed it to pretend to be a 704 for the purposes of running the old software. Emulation is now a common technique used to run old software on new hardware. It does, however, have a problem of recursion—what happens when there is no longer compatible hardware to run the emulator itself? Emulators can by layered like Matryoshka dolls, one running inside another running inside another.

Being Practical
Given all of this varied advice, what can we do to save our personal digital data? First and foremost, make regular backup copies onto easily copied media (such as hard drives) and place these copies in different locations. Try reading documents, photos and other media whenever upgrading software or hardware, and convert them to new formats as needed. Lastly, if possible, print out highly important items and store them safely—there seems to be no getting away from occasionally reverting to this “outdated” media type. None of these steps will guarantee the data’s survival, but not taking them almost guarantees that the data will be lost, sooner or later. This process does seem to involve a lot more effort than my grandparents went to when shoving photos into a shoebox in the attic decades ago, but perhaps this is one of the costs for the miracles of our digital age.

If all this seems like too much work, there is one last possibility. We could revert our digital data back to an analog form and use traditional media-preservation techniques. An extreme example of this is demonstrated by the Rosetta Project, a scholarly endeavor to preserve parallel texts of all of the world’s written languages. The project has created a metal disk (right) on which miniaturized versions of more than 13,000 pages of text and images have been etched using techniques similar to computer-chip lithography. It is expected that this disk could last up to 2,000 years because, physically, the disk has more in common with a stone tablet than a modern hard drive. Although this approach should work for some important data, it is much more expensive to use in the short term than almost any practical digital solution and is less capable in some cases (for example, it’s not good for audio or video). Perhaps it is better thought of as a cautionary example of what our future might look like if we are not able to make the digital world in which we find ourselves remain successful over time.