phyllostachys 79: Minute Tech 64 Show Transcript

64 - How do you organize information? The Book.

Good morning, this is Alex Landefeld with episode 64 of the Minute Tech podcast -

coming to you for Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

On this tech podcast about the broader meanings of technology, we'll mention:

- Google Crunches Petabytes daily;
- How Do You Organize Information? The Book.
- Dawn Papuga & the Stage Representation of Scar.

---------------

Minute Tech podcast is brought to you by:

Pittsburgh-native Larry Tolbert, teaching taiji and qi gong. Having studied with Chen, Yang and Wu stylists, as well as Shaolin Wushu & Capoeira meistre's, sifu Larry Moves with the motion of the planet.
E-mail leonardtolbert-[at]-hotmail-[dot]-com for more info.

And:

Ravelings by Carol. Pittsburgh-region classes in needle-craft - encompassing crochet, embroidery, knitting, & tatting, as well as an associated lace collection. For more information, contact Carol at carolb207-[at]-alltel-[dot]-net.

Tech News:

And you thought that Google was an advertising company, or a search engine? Behind the scenes, Google is really a massive storage provide and number cruncher, storing 10's of gigabytes of data for each of 100's of thousands or millions of individual e-mail account holders, crunching 10's of petabytes (1 petabyte equals 1000 terabytes or 1,000,000 gigabytes) of internet pages, mapping pictures and blog posts on a daily basis...and developing in-house talent to manage, program and scale the monstrously large enterprise. Note: I don't use the term monstrous to imply monstrosity, but rather to suggest the huge scale of this computing undertaking. Tim Finin reports on UMBC's equity Research Group's site that Google fellows Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat have posted an ACM paper about the MapReduce programming that they've helped develop for Google to handle the Petabytes of data being crunched by Google's computers daily. The MapReduce programming models are a way for programmers to handle huge dataset's on cluster computer systems, which utilized large numbers of similar computers to compute information in parallel, store data in parallel storage and distribute computing needs across hundreds or thousands of computers. Note that while this amount of data processing may seem overwhelming and totally out of touch with the needs of the normal computer-user...this type of power will soon be in the hands of consumers as PC computing power increases, our world-wide interaction with other's digital photo and video content increases, and our ability to navigate virtual and real worlds through the eyes of computers increase. All this power, parallelization, distribution and storage will be needed to manage our daily stream of information.

Today is the day we've been waiting for since January of 2007 - Steve Job's keynote speech at MacWorld 2008. Stay tuned to your favorite rumor site, such as engadget.com, macnn.com or macrumors.com (and many others) for live minute-by-minute coverage...or stream Mr. Job's keynote direct from Apple's website after the event. Note that as Apple improves the way we interact with the real world by helping us capture it digitally in image, video, song and blog, our compute needs and data storage needs increase exponentially.

Tech Question:

How do you organize information? The Book.
Moving beyond the single or collective data processing capabilities of the human brain, humans turned to physical records of information too tedious to retain in memory, such as the number and type of livestock in a herd, the number and capacities of jugs of wine, olive oil or grain in the communal store-rooms or the epic stories & ideas been produced by store-teller's, prophets, seers and scientists.

When people began learning to mark down information, perhaps originally making dots or lines on stones, pieces of wood or in mud tablets, then began to realize that if a system of organization of these markings was developed, they wouldn't have to remember everything in their minds, freeing them up to do more interesting things than just remembering all the boring details. They could turn to arts, sciences, sports, skilled trades, romance and dining...and even develop ruling and religious classes of people. All of these activities can generally only come about if the tedious information is catalogued in some way, although certainly many people for many thousands of years had trained themselves and others to become human data storage devices, learning to catalog, file and search information in mental structures.

The main problem with brain-held information, though, is that it goes away when the person dies, and if not all information from that person has been committed to somebody else's memory, then the original information is lost. Hence the need for written records: information continuity. Once written records were devised, languages had to be adapted for longevity and recording materials had to be adapted for survival through generations of librarians, readers and subsequent writers.

I've discussed books in previous podcasts, so I won't go over them again. Next we'll talk about ways in which 20th century humans have moved beyond storing information in books.

Podcasting - Blogging News:

Oh my gosh, no sooner did I post that book reviewer Dawn Papuga had posted a recent book review of Sebastian Faulks' Engleby on her lyriquetragedy.blogspot.com book-review blog, she posted yet another review...this time of the stage adaptation of Disney's The Lion King. Ms. Papuga states that while the set's, costumes and characterizations were excellently implemented, the stage implementation of the crucial character-developments of the story itself left something to be desired - check out her blog post at http://lyriquetragedy.blogspot.com to see just how she analyses this important modern story of a young person's coming-of-age challenges. In the end, Ms. Papuga is absolutely correct in her estimations that obsessive viewing of the animated film version of the story by millions of young people should allow for inclusion of the more adult themes in the story in the stage version, rather than removing them due to a young stage audience.


That's all for today on Minute Tech podcast.
you can reach me at minutetech@gmail.com -
and my blog is at minutetech.blogspot.com

"Move with the motion of the planet - move with Taiji"

- Google Crunches Petabytes daily;
- How Do You Organize Information? The Book.
- Dawn Papuga & the Stage Representation of Scar.

Go to the Minute Tech iWeb page to subscribe or listen to this podcast: Minute Tech.

Interstitial music by Apple & Bre Pettis