Month: November 2003

remembering rebecca: 11.03

Among their jaw-dropping findings: the amount of new information stored on paper, film, magnetic and optical media has roughly doubled in the last three years. Five exabytes of new information — roughly five billion gigabytes — was created in 2002 alone. How big are five exabytes? Imagine half a million libraries as big as the Library of Congress print collections, and you’re on the right track. Each year almost 800 MB of recorded information is produced per person. If stored on paper, that would take about 30 feet of books. But 92% of all that new information is stored on magnetic media, mostly hard disks, rather than on paper, film or optical media.

The cited work is here.

I have a quibble with the use of “information” when I see claims like this. In an old analogy (circa 1996) that I still think holds up, I defined data as oil in the ground and information as gas at the pump. Information informs as a result of having been refined.

And of course the other issue I take with this is with the notion that any of this information is created: I suspect a lot of it is replicated. In the digital age, taking copies of stuff is easy, and I would wager than a lot of the bulging hard drives cited are littered with copies of material created and archived elsewhere.

Perhaps I am misreading this: I don’t know if the study is find that individuals are creating 800 Mb of stuff each year or if stuff is being created on their behalf, on the order of 800 Mb.

It strikes me, from personal experience, that much of the paper usage cited is not for original works but such embarrassments as printed email and copies of presentations that, while created for the screen, are printed in paper.

News Analysis: Attacks in Saudi Arabia Aim to Rattle a Dynasty

“I think they are after the royal family,” said Wyche Fowler Jr., a former senator who was ambassador to Saudi Arabia from October 1997 to February 2001. “There is a determined fight to rattle the government if not bring it down.”

A prominent Saudi who advises the royal household agreed. “This is an effort to destabilize the regime,” he said. “It’s against the monarchy and it is against the government.”

With domestic rumblings to reduce US dependence on oil imports — read: Saudi Arabia — and increased opposition, even violence, against the regime, what will it take to force a hard look at this relationship? Regime change at home seems like a prerequisite, since the incumbent never met a resource extraction industry he didn’t like. But what then?

It could be argued that the US has common cause with Osama bin Laden and Al Queda, in wanting the House of Saud to use its considerable wealth for good, rather than evil, but for different definitions of good and evil.

I got an email from the Subordinate Professor today, and I had to delete it after one reading: it was too painful. Not so much for me but there was hurt evident in the message. I got the impression she had read some of the postings chronicling this situation, and was unhappy at her portrayal.

Perhaps I could been more positive and offered suggestions for the future, rather than just venting spleen, but I don’t know, even now, if anything I suggest would be taken in the intended spirit.

To her, then, I offer this advice: Speak the truth, even though your voice shakes. Sitting idly by when you sense an injustice is wrong, no matter the reason, be it apathy, fear, whatever. Apologizing to others that “you have to go along with it” undermines you even further by acknowledging the wrong and admitting your cowardice.

I wanted the whole thing to end sooner — much sooner, like June — and if it became unbearably painful as a result of being extended many months past that, I can only hope there’s a lesson there.

Someong with a thicker skin or who wasn’t seeing the stress showing up in their kids’ behavior might have stuck it out longer. I have the former, but couldn’t tolerate the latter.

What’s next? I don’t quite know.

Blocking of Email From Some Domains

Between January and September of 2003, more than 65 million of more than 155 million messages [42%] were classified as spam. These numbers are only for the primary University mail relays, and do not include virus-infected messages. While the domain blocks will only affect a fraction of this load, they should significantly reduce the burden on both the email relays and the email hosts to which the messages are ultimately delivered.

We realize that this is an imperfect solution, however, resources are finite and spam apparently isn’t.

aaack. Those are amazing numbers ….

My last day. Anticlimactic in some ways. Some suggested I just call in sick, but I had taken some sick days earlier when I was having some foot trouble. Once that was less of a problem, I was OK with trying to finish up as best I could.

The Subordinate Professor was nowhere to be seen. I had heard she was having her dog euthanized and with a baby on the way (4 months or so along) I can only imagine how that felt. The Superior Professor was in and about as clueful as one would expect. She even brought me some work to do: I had to take some course evaluations from a continuing ed program and average the scores for each presenter over four criteria and overall, for 10 presenters. Call it half an hour’s work in Excel, but only if you know how to use such arcane features as AVERAGE(). <sigh> The Superior and Subordinate Professors both want to take a class so they can learn these valuable skills. I can’t recall *not* knowing how to do these things . . . . . Complicated financial models and “what-if” scenarios — the kind of thing that multi-million dollar investments hinge on — these aren’t.

It occurs to me that some people’s idea of “point and click” is to point at a task and click/snap their fingers in impatience while someone else does the work . . . .

I finished that task, cleared off my desk, trashed all my email, put a vacation reply on my that email address, removed my account from my computer, changed the admin password, and called it a day at noon:45. Fielded some email from folks who were responding to my farewell address or were catching up on the last few weeks of weblog entries.

No goodbyes, no “thanks for all your hard work”, no “sorry it didn’t work out,” no nothing.

I’m just glad it’s over.