June 2015 – Auxiliary Memory

The Beatles and Other Forgotten Bands

By James Wallace Harris, June 30, 2015

Now that Apple has entered the streaming music business it’s obvious that streaming is the future. After more than a century of wax cylinders, 78s, LPs, 45s, 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs, DATs, SACDs, MP3s, music will arrive by subscribing to bits and bytes. We’re now in a transition phase. Some people will listen to music they own, and others will listen to music they rent. As the advantages of subscription music become apparent to all, most listeners will forget about owning. If songs aren’t instantly available on their smartphones, they will be forgotten.

Because I listen to ninety-nine percent of my music through Spotify, The Beatles are becoming a forgotten band. I’m sure Apple hopes to make an exclusive deal to stream The Beatles like they did for selling their songs and albums by digital downloads. If The Beatles make such an agreement, I might forget them completely. I bought twelve of their thirteen re-mastered CDs when they came out a couple years ago, but I don’t play them. Some are still in the shrink wrap. Listening to music on Spotify is just too damn convenient.

Most of the famous bands that held out against the subscription music tide have given in – AC/DC is the latest example. I have to admire that group for not making an exclusive deal. During the transition phase to a complete subscription music age, we will have to find ways to deal with forgotten bands. There are several reasons why music from the past isn’t offered today.

First, a band will refuse to allow their music to be streamed. That’s becoming less likely as people quit buying music. Second, music is often tied up in legal battles. Again, that will be resolved. There is a lot of music from the past that is forgotten because there’s no demand or its creators aren’t around to promote it. I assume this will change over time as those who still remember will complain. Finally, what we can hear will be limited by exclusive deals. There’s over a dozen subscription music services out there now with more coming on line all the time. The best way to capture subscribers is to promise the biggest catalog, especially catalogs with artists and albums that other services don’t contain. I find this mercenary practice a heinous aspect of the music business.

Right now the standard price for subscribing to a music library is $10 a month. If some services seek to dominate with exclusive deals, there will be a tendency towards monopolies and squeezing out the smaller services, or for people to subscribe to more than one music site. One solution to make subscribing to multiple libraries possible is to change the fee structure. For example, if Spotify and Apple charged $2.99 to be a subscriber, and then one penny a play, then fans could easily enjoy two sites and pay artists fairly.

One reason why artists have avoided subscription services is the low royalty payments. Between the music publishers and subscription services, they seem to make the best deals for themselves. Apple almost got away with giving people three months of music to new subscribers without paying the artists. I think the artists would get a better deal if their payments were separated from subscription fees.

One cent a play is the perfect payment. That cent should be divvied fairly between the composers, performers and record companies. The one cent fee should only be for specific playing of songs. For random background listening, artists should get a lesser fee paid out of the subscription service fee. That way, unless a fan plays specific songs all day long, most listeners will still stay close to the $10 a month bill.

With better royalties I believe most music from the past will be unearthed and put online. Forgotten bands and their albums will show up in libraries, making subscription music nearly perfect. Right now there are many favorite songs from the past that I can’t add to my playlists. In the future, when everything I want to hear is in my subscription, I can’t imagine another system of music delivery ever replacing it.

Pictured are just some of the albums I can’t play on Spotify today. I hope they will all be available within a year.

JWH

Why Science is Not Myth

By James Wallace Harris, Monday, June 29, 2015

My book club was discussing Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari when Linda said she liked how the author compared capitalism to religion. Tim replied that many things are like religion, including atheism. Cayce then added everything boils down to myths, including science. I knew what Tim and Cayce were getting at, that we all use our beliefs like a religion, and that we understand aspects of reality through stories, but I objected that science should be called another myth. Cayce then countered that I should show him a photograph of an electron. Tim then commented that science often gets corrupted and misused. Cayce then said that science can’t prove anything, and can only offer a probability that never approached certainty.

I wanted to argue more, but by then, it seemed like we were getting into a private discussion, boring the rest of the group. However, I think it’s extremely important to define why science is not myth. First I think we need to define the word myth. For our purposes I’d say myths are stories that explain reality. However, one definition of myth is a false story – “That’s just a myth.” I’m not sure if Cayce was arguing that science is a myth because it’s just another story explaining reality, or that no story can explain the absolute truth about reality, so they are all myths.

I believe it’s important to distinguish that science is not myth because it’s the only cognitive tool our species has developed to explain how reality works. Myths, religions and philosophy have failed at explaining reality, and what sets science apart is its success. Science is the only system of thought that has consistently worked even though it doesn’t offer absolute certainty, or answers to all questions.

One reason why myths sometimes appear to work is believers assume our reality is not the real reality, that we live in an illusion, and a higher reality contains the truth to our existence. Some believers in myths believe reality is mutable and thought can shape reality. However, I’m working on the assumption that there is an external reality, that it’s part of a single reality, and reality can be understood by observation.

To assume science is just another myth, is to suggest that reality is unknowable. It implies that the knowledge we’ve gained from science is just another illusion. I reject that for two reasons. First, science is a method, not a belief. Second, the results of science is too consistent.

Myths impose concepts on reality. Science reveals patterns in reality. Myths come from the inner world of our subjective minds. Science studies objective reality outside our brains. Science and myth are polar opposites.

Too many people today think the data collected by the process of scientific research as something you can accept or reject. There are two problems here. One, the current results of science can be uncertain, and two, people want to believe what they want to believe. It’s unfair to judge science because people don’t like the results, or the results are inconclusive. Science constantly refines what we know about reality because it never stops gatherings new information. Myths never do that.

Myths are popular memes. We keep myths going because people like them. For instance the idea of heaven. There has never been on shred of evidence that heaven exists, but most people believe in it.

Myths are ideas we want to be true. Scientific ideas are ones we prove to be true. Myths require no evidence. Science does.

The reason science is not myth is because science is a technique not an idea. The results of the scientific method are statistical data. Mythology produces infinite possibilities. Science shows us consistent patterns.

Science does not depend on belief. Gravity works whether you believe in it or not. So does evolution and climate change. Electrons exist without us seeing them. Seven billion plus people use electrons every day. Electrons are immensely dependable and predictable. Cayce was holding an iPhone when he asked for a photograph of an electron. I should have pointed out that an iPhone is better evidence of electrons than any picture.

Mythology produced countless human cultures before the advent of science. Since the advent of science culture is homogenizing around consistent scientific results. The Comanche of North America, the Australian aborigines, or even the Israelites of the Old Testament could imagine living in any kind of reality they wanted, but they could never have built a Boeing 777 or IMAX theater. Citizens around the Earth are seeing a consistent reality because science showed us how to build cars, computers, cell phones and CT scanners.

Humans around the globe rebel against science because they want their myths. This is why I’m making such a fuss about refusing to accept science as myth. We have a clear choice. We can live in the illusion of what we want to believe, or we can use science to study how reality actually works and adapt our minds and culture to what’s real.

JWH

When Does Nonfiction Go Stale?

By James Wallace Harris, Friday, June 19, 2015

When does a newspaper transform from news to wastepaper? How old do the magazines at your dentist office have to be before you sneer at reading them? When does a science book become a history book? Why don’t we have classic nonfiction books like we have classic novels? What’s so important about new information as opposed to old information? If you found a two week old newspaper in your house you’d immediately throw it away, but if you found a 1832 newspaper in your attic you’d treasure it. How many bestselling novels from 1955 are still read today versus the nonfiction bestsellers from that year? When The Bible and The Iliad were written there was no distinction between fiction and nonfiction.

Sometimes it seems the books I enjoy reading the most are novels from the 19th century and the nonfiction books just published that are getting a lot of buzz. The only nonfiction book I can remember reading from the 19th century is Walden; or Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau. I’ve always meant to read On the Origins of Species by Charles Darwin.

I started reading Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence by George B. Dyson, a book I bought new back in 1997, but just now getting around to reading. Dyson is the son of Freeman Dyson, and the author of the more recent book Turing’s Cathedral (2012), which I bought and is also lying around here waiting to be read. I wonder if I’ve waited too long to read Darwin Among the Machines, because I’ve read The Information (2011) by James Gleick and The Innovators (2014) by Walter Isaacson, as well as many other books about artificial intelligence and information theory since 1997. However, Dyson has a unique approach to the history of thinking machines, starting his story with Thomas Hobbes and his book Leviathan. Dyson even ties in H. G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon. This is the kind of book I would write if I had the discipline to write books.

Yet, I wonder about reading such an old book when there are so many newer books waiting to be read. Is there a Read By date for nonfiction books?

Dyson opens with,

“Nature (the Art whereby God hath made and governes the World) is by the Art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an Artificial Animal,” wrote Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) on the first page of his Leviathan; or, The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill, published to great disturbance in 1651. “For seeing life is but a motion of Limbs, the beginning whereof is in the principall part within; why may we not say that all Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheeles as doth a watch) have an artificiall life?”¹ Hobbes believed that the human commonwealth, given substance by the power of its institutions and the ingenuity of its machines, would coalesce to form that Leviathan described in the Old Testament, when the Lord, speaking to Job out of the whirlwind, had warned, “Upon earth there is not his like, who is made without fear.”

Three centuries after Hobbes, automata are multiplying with an agility that no vision formed in the seventeenth century could have foretold. Artificial intelligence flickers on the desktop and artificial life has become a respectable pursuit. But the artificial life and artificial intelligence that so animated Hobbes’s outlook on the world was not the discrete, autonomous mechanical intelligence conceived by the architects of digital processing in the twentieth century. Hobbes’s Leviathan was a diffuse, distributed, artificial organism more characteristic of the technologies and computational architectures approaching with the arrival of the twenty-first.

The trouble is Dyson wrote this sometime before 1997, and artificial intelligence has come a long way since then, beyond what Dyson could imagine eighteen years ago. Yet, what he’s really writing about are the centuries of thought before the 20th century on the subject – and that is mostly new to me. The common starting place seems to be with Babbage and Ada Lovelace, so it’s rather interesting that Dyson starts with Hobbes.

I guess it depends on what I’m enjoying learning. I seem to have two modes of interest. First is, what’s happening right now. The second is, how did we get here. Should I spend my time reading about the current state of global intelligence, or study the history of how someone imagined it would be hundreds of years ago?

I could be reading The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality published 9/1/14 by Luciano Floridi. The Fourth Revolution is a book Hobbes would have found very interesting.

I wish I could read, digest and summarize a book in my blog in three or four hours. It takes me one or two weeks to read a book, and often longer to digest. If I really get caught up into a book I want to follow its leads and tangents. Just reading the first chapter of the Dyson book makes me want to go read about Thomas Hobbes. But do I need to spend so much time thinking about the 17th century when I live in the 21st? Tim Urban claims in “The AI Revolution” that the years 2000-2014 experienced as much progress as all the progress in the 20th century, and that the years 2015-2021 will speed even faster through that same amount of new information.

I am reminded of an old play title – Stop the World I Want To Get Off. Of course, I’m also reminded of that bestseller of the 1970s, Future Shock. Maybe it would easier on my mind to read Thomas Hobbes than Luciano Floridi. Yet, isn’t it sort of sad, that whatever nonfiction book I’ll read will be out-of-date in just a few years. If I had a good memory, I could tally up a very long list of nonfiction books that promoted some kind of far out idea as a possible understanding of how reality works yet has since been forgotten. How many people remember The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris or The Origins of Consciousness if the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes?

Not only do we surf the web, but we surf the current state of knowledge by reading the latest nonfiction books. New information flows into creation far faster than we can gain wisdom from processing that data. Is it practical for me to stop and read a book from 1997? Dyson was working to make sense of 1996.

Quite often new popular science books rephrase the same histories the older books covered. How many popular physics books have I read that summarized Einstein’s discovery of general relativity or Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems? Generally my knowledge of science lags far behind it’s discovery. At least I gave up on String Theory before The Big Bang characters did.

I read for fun, so does it matter when a book is published if it’s fun to read? I’m not a scientist, so I don’t need to be up on the latest theories. I can never understand science at anything more than a popular science level, which is essentially at a philosophical level. And at a philosophical level, Darwin Among the Machines is still a fun read.

The problem that continues to nag me is whether or not I’m being the most efficient reader I can be. I only have a few more years left to live, and I want to cram in as much knowledge as possible. I know it leaks out my brain as fast as I consume it, but overall, a little residue remains and it feels like I’m progressing in my understanding of reality.

The decision to read an old nonfiction book versus a new nonfiction book must be made on how much knowledge will it add to my overall collection. That means I must choose between a writer who is carefully digesting a lot of historical information versus a writer who is reporting a lot of new information.

JWH

Playing Detective to My Own Mysteries

By James Wallace Harris, Wednesday, June 17, 2015

I’m cleaning out closets in my never-ending quest to follow my tidying-up guru, Marie Kondo. This morning I went though boxes of old family papers that I inherited when my mother died years ago. I had stashed them away to avoid processing them. These include old family letters, orders my father got from the Air Force, ancient report cards, newspaper clippings, birth-marriage-death certificates, and other records with proofs of long forgotten facts.

I was going to throw the entire box away, or give it to my sister and let it be her problem. Then I started noticing enticing facts here and there, like addresses and dates I’d long forgotten. I grew up always on the move. I have no idea how many houses I lived in before I moved away from home, nor am I sure of all the schools I attended. I remember what states I lived in, but not always sure when. For example, I lived in South Carolina twice, but I can’t place the first in time at all. Some of my faulty memory clues tell me it was after I started school, but I have absolutely no memories of going to school in my very vivid earlier memories of South Carolina. Since we moved a round a lot, it could have only been for a summer, and I’ve even wondered if my parents kept me and my sister out of school. Now that I think about it, I don’t remember it being cold. I figured it was sometime between age 4 and 7.

I’ve always believe the first time I went to a movie theater was when I lived in South Carolina the first time. I later learned that movie, Snowfire, was released May 18, 1958. I would have been six, and I started first grade when I was five. Growing up I vaguely thought I had lived in South Carolina the first time before I started Kindergarten, which I attended in Miami in 1956-57. But Snowfire wouldn’t come out for two years. Both memories can’t be right. I do remember the theater building, which I think was on base, so it could have been in New Jersey in 1959, and we were seeing Snowfire as an older release.

It seems a little anal now to worry about where I used to live almost sixty years ago. I could throw all those papers away, or I could go through them and look for clues. Creating a timeline of when and where I’ve lived might be an interesting mind building exercise. Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn’t be cleaning out my memories like Marie Kondo pushes me to clean out closets. Does it really matter? No one is interested in it but me. My mother saved all this stuff that was important to her, and now that she’s dead, it’s just landfill. The 94-year-old lady living next door recently died, and her family have parked a long dumpster in the back yard to clean out her house. Their family has been living there almost as long as I’ve been alive. The weight of her memories piles high in that container.

I’m also thinking about just scanning all this inherited paperwork. Although I’m not sure how often I would look at it after making such a huge effort. Will this information become more important to me when I’m in my seventies or eighties? Marie Kondo asks me to hold each object I own and ask myself, “Does this bring me joy?” Nostalgia could be a form of joy – maybe? On the other hand, freeing myself from the weight of the past, brings another kind of joy.

My father died when I was 18, and he’s always been a mystery to me. We never had many conversations. My parents were alcoholics. Dad died before I got old enough to be curious about his past, and even though my mother lived to be 91, she chose to forget a lot of her past. I once asked her about our first time living in South Carolina and she couldn’t remember when it was. If I took the trouble to examine this box of documents I might discern some information about my Dad. I’ve even thought of using the freedom of information act to track down information about my father’s Air Force assignments.

I have scanned in most of my family photos that go back to the 1920s, and I’ve been trying to find ways to useful organize and display them. Often I don’t know the exact dates when the photographs were taken. I wished I did. I could name each photograph and scanned document by the date and have a timeline slideshow. I’d have to date them like this: “1930-08-07 Great grandparents.jpg” and “1963-12-25 Report Card Becky.jpg” to sort properly and know what they were.

On the other hand, I could just trash it all. I doubt these odds and ends artifacts have been looked at three times in the past fifty years. One thing I’m learning from The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up is everything should have a place. As I organize my physical belongings to reside in their unique place in the house, I wonder if I shouldn’t put all my digital belongings in their unique place on Dropbox.

JWH

What Was On That Dead Drive?

By James Wallace Harris, Sunday, June 14, 2015

The other day my 2TB hard drive died.

I used to work in a college where I supported hundreds of computer users. One thing I preached to my users was the importance of backing up. I constantly told them to back up any file they would hate to lose. And for any file they’d emotionally die if they lost, it should be backed up in two or more physical locations. Over the years I saw some serious crying over lost files. I can’t believe how many graduate students I met that kept all their work on a flash drive. Some lost everything. One professor lost the first draft of a book.

Hard drives are interesting devices – a cross between an external brain and an attic. I’ve been using this drive for so long I can’t remember when I bought it, nor do I have any idea what I could have squirreled away there. It had been about two thirds full. 1,400 gigabytes of data is a lot.

I’ve tried to recover it but so far no luck. I have no idea what was on that drive, yet I’m not too worried. Years ago I started saving to Dropbox. I believe everything I really care about is there, but I don’t know for sure. I won’t know until I go look for a file and can’t find it.

Dropbox saves files to both your computer and their server. If you have Dropbox on a second machine, it will replicate all the files on the server to the new machine if that machine has plenty of drive space. I used to have several machines that Dropbox was mirrored. Machines at work and home. So all my files were replicated on all those local drives. When I retired I lost the ability to have my files stored in two locations. But I figured I had the remote Dropbox site and 3-4 home computers. However, I’ve been cleaning out old machines, so I’m now down to two machines with Dropbox mirrors. That should be enough. But the first thing I did when I set up my new machine was to connect to Dropbox and let it mirror my content.

I also run SecondCopy and replicate my Dropbox folder to my OneDrive. That puts my important files on two cloud drives.

What if Dropbox went out of business? That’s a scary thought. I used to use Mozy, an online backup system. It backed up my entire drive. If I had been using Mozy when my 2TB drive died I would know what I lost. However, 2TB is expensive to back up that way. I dropped Mozy when I got Dropbox and started only worrying about backing up data I created. I figured I’d just reinstall the OS and software.

I do know one of the biggest folders on my dead TB drive was my Music folder which had around 140GB of MP3 files. I have a backup of them on an external drive, and a copy on Amazon and Google Music. Because I’m a long time streaming music user I worry little about all my ripped songs – even though I spent months ripping my CD collection. I have my collection on two cloud services, but I seldom play them.

I think all my photographs were on Dropbox – but I’m not sure. My routine was to scan to my Picture folder on the PC, and then copy the images to the appropriate folders on Dropbox. I don’t know if I filed my last scanning session. That’s the thing about having a 2TB drive – you just can’t keep up with all the stuff you throw on it. It’s 2,000GB. There was over a million files on it.

What I have lost is hundreds of television shows recorded with my SiliconDust HDHomeRun, a network TV tuner. This has happened to me before. I had a Home Theater PC lose it’s drive with hundreds of documentaries I had recorded over many years. I’m not too worried about this either. I tend to record way more TV than I ever watch.

I also kept .iso images of CD and DVD install discs for all the programs I’ve bought over the years. I haven’t thrown those discs away; the .iso copies were my backups. However, most of my old software is just that – old. Since I subscribe to Microsoft’s Office 365 Home, the install is in the cloud. Except for an ancient copy of Photoshop I cling to, I seldom install anything from these old discs anymore when I set up a new machine.

For days now, every since my 2TB drive went south, I’ve racked my brains trying to think what was on that sucker! It’s like getting old, and forgetting names, you don’t know you’ve forgotten until you try to remember. On the other hand, maybe we only remember what we regularly use.

While trying to recover my 2TB drive I found five other internal drives I had stored away. I went through those drives and found years and years of backups. Backups of backups. I had copies of all the programs I ever wrote at work. Before I retired I carefully backed them up thinking I would cherish them in the future. Two years later, I instantly decided to delete them. With a few clicks of the mouse decades of coding vanished. I had archives of all the web pages and photographs I took at work. Sent them down the bit bucket too.

If I had had the chance to review the stuff on my 2TB drive before it died, I probably would have deleted most of it. But I have this nagging worry that there were things on it I still want, but I have no idea what they are. My wife works out of town, and when I’m in a cleaning out mood, she tells me I can throw away things but just don’t tell her. She knows if she was asked she’d want to keep it, but if she doesn’t know it won’t matter.

Chance has done some spring cleaning for me.

I write this to remind you about your files. What if your hard drive crashed for good?

If you want to try Dropbox for free use this link. I’ll earn some free space credit. After you join, give your link code to friends to earn extra space. That’s a nice feature of Dropbox.

If you subscribe to Office365 Microsoft gives you 1TB of cloud storage. Google is in the cloud drive business. Amazon also sells cloud drive space. And like I told my users, really important files should be backed up to two locations. Pick a big name company, and one that has client software to map a drive on your computer. Then you can decide on a main storage site and use replication software to back it up automatically to a second cloud site.

JWH