Here's what he said:

"My system for storing digital files hasn't changed. Just more hard drives, and more dead ones. This is the most recorded era of human history, but I wonder how many of the records will survive."

I mirror my photos in 3 places: a backup hard drive, a Flickr Pro account, and MobileMe.

Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever.

Recently, our babysitter was struck by a car just a few steps from our front door. Luckily, none of her injuries were life threatening. Her cell phone, however, was brutalized beyond recognition.

Before heading to the emergency room, I climbed into the back of the ambulance where I asked her if she wanted me to call her boyfriend. She said she did, but she didn't know his telephone number. It was lost along with her now obliterated cell phone, and she had never committed the number to memory.

I remember the phone number to the very first house I lived in, when I was 4, even though I haven't used it since I was in first grade. But I could not tell you my father's cellphone number, which has remained unchanged for at least 5 years. (Mark helpfully explains why this is.) [Tweetage Wasteland via Daring Fireball]

Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever.

You'll only remember hazy scraps and snippets, like when the guitarist smashed his Fender into the speaker and you got clipped in the eye by plastic shrapnel because you were right up front, and never moved, never gave an inch to the intruding crowd, even though you had to pee really bad during the last three songs. Those are the moments that matter, the ones you'll hang onto, the ones you'll recount again and again in bars and on roadtrips. Or maybe you're drunk, and you won't remember anything, but the next day, you'll know you had a really amazing time, inversely proportional to the size of your hangover, and by how wispy the images, sounds and smells are that billow through your brain are.

Not that you were pissed off for half an hour while you tried to hold your arm steady against the quaking crowd, clenching your entire body to forever freeze the perfect photo op, or waiting for the most awesome possible time to record a clip, stalking that ephemeral moment like prey, just to upload it for your other friends who were lame and didn't make it.

Those photos might be on Facebook forever, but what are you really recording for posterity? A million smudged pixels that, if I squint, vaguely resembles John Mayer? A blown out recording of a song that sounds kinda like a bad cover of that Grizzly Bear song? Oh, it's really Vampire Weekend. And it is "Two Weeks." Oops.

Just because you can document and share nearly every moment of your life doesn't mean you should. Stop worrying so much about stealing away with an image or a clip that perfectly crystallizes the night, like a trophy to collect, another document to catalog, and just experience it. Enjoy it. There's not a camera on the planet that can capture the way a concert makes you feel. Take one picture. Mark the occasion. Then put your goddamn camera down.

Image is CC licensed from Flickr user Mosesxan.

Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever.

We humans love our photos. Thanks to digital cameras, we take thousands more photos than we ever did before—some cute, some funny and others, quite scandalous.

Often in relationships, people upload their photos to Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Kodak Gallery or other photo sharing sites. Other times, they never leave a person's phone or camera.

While the photos are of a twosome's shared life together, they are technically the password protected property of only one person. When two people split, the one-sided ownership of the photos may become achingly apparent.

On the surface this is simply a permissions issue. But all's fair in love and war and, at a deeper level, the partner who uploaded the photos may find that by deleting photos or changing their ex's ability to view them, they can effectively control their ex's ability to "remember" or have access to these memories.

If you find yourself blocked, you can politely ask for global access to the photos or to specific ones you liked, but you can't force the issue (nor do you want to desperately chase down your ex over megapixels).

If you find yourself the owner of said photos, it is indeed your right to restrict access but is that how you want to end things? If you want to delete the photos as part of moving on, consider giving your ex fair warning, so that he or she can remove any photos before you get rid of them from your Facebook or Flickr. And, for the love of kindness everywhere, please don't keep photos of your shared children or pets away from an ex. Breakups and divorce are hard enough without both parties having fair access to these types of memories.

Going forward, I tend to suggest that people save copies of photos they want while things are still good. Save uploaded photos to your own hard drive, Bump your iPhone photos or ask your partner to send them to you in the moment or when you're lying in bed the next morning looking back over them.

Even if you can't imagine a time when you and your beloved will be fighting over photos, you might find yourself—somewhere down the road —wishing you could fawn over the memories or, alternatively, CatPaint your ex into the Cat Lady you always knew she was.

Image CC licensed from Flickr user basykes

Read more of Dr. Debby's relationship advice here.

Debby Herbenick, PhD is a Research Scientist and Associate Director of The Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University, a sexual health educator at The Kinsey Institute and author of Because It Feels Good: A Woman's Guide to Sexual Pleasure and Satisfaction. She blogs at MySexProfessor.com.

There are lots of ways data can die: YouTube can pull a video offline before anybody snags it, your hard drive can crash, taking ultra-rare Grateful Dead bootlegs that you never got a chance to upload to Usenet with it, or maybe you designed a brilliant piece of visual art a decade ago in some kooky file format that simply doesn't exist anymore, and there's no possible way to view the file without traveling to some creepy dude's basement a thousand miles away.

What we're talking about is digital rot—or data rot or bit decay or whatever you'd like to call it—systemic processes which can mean death to data. Kind of a problem when you'd like to keep it around forever. Let's paint this in broad strokes: You can roughly break the major kinds of rot into hardware, software and network. That is, the hardware that breaks down, the formats that go extinct, and the online stuff that vanishes one way or another.

The Hard Life of Hardware

Everything's gotta be stored on something. And guess what? All media age. (Except diamonds—bling bling, biatch.) Brain cells die, film degrades and hard drives break.

A sampling of common digital media and their life expectancies (assuming you take care of them):
• Floppy disk - This can theoretically survive between 3 and 10 million passes
• CD and DVDs - It depends heavily on the materials used in their construction (PDF), but you're looking at anywhere between 2 and 10 and 25 years, in the best of circumstances
• Flash storage - Also depends on the type, letting you write between 10,000 cycles with multi-level flash memory, or 100,000 with single-cell flash
• Hard disk drives - Kind of a crapshoot—anecdotally, five years is a good average, though they can last shorter or longer, depending, again, on how they're built

Google, with its millions of servers, is in the best position to test hard drives from every manufacturer, and conducted a massive study of HDD failure. Basically, if a drive makes it past the first six months, it's pretty likely to make it through Year 4, but it is going to die at some point (and makes/models die in batches). As you probably don't need to be told, hard drives can fail in any number of ways.

In other words, whatever you're storing your precious data on, back it up, preferably with a mix of drives or media from different manufacturers/time periods.

But what if you're, say, the Library of Congress, the largest library in the world, charged with a mission "to sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations," and suddenly confronted—after 200 years of relatively tranquil existence—by an unending, ever-expanding digital deluge that must be archived and cataloged? On top of a copy of every piece of material that's registered through the United States Copyright Office, and the two centuries of (oftentimes badly damaged) cultural history you're already trying to preserve? How do you store stuff?

"DVDs and CDs aren't even considered storage," say Martha Anderson and Beth Dulaban, from the LoC's Office of Strategic Initiatives. They need to transfer shiny-silver-disc content to something sturdier to meet their mission requirements. For digital content, the Library uses a mix of hard disks and tape, like Oracle's StorageTek T10000B 1TB tape drives, rated for 30 years of archive life. At the Packard Campus, the main battle station for the LoC's audio-visual preservation, they have 10,000 tapes providing 10 petabytes of capacity, Gregory Lukow, from the LoC's Motion Picture, Broadcasting & Recorded Sound Division told me. In the video above, you can see a SAMMA robot hard at work. These do analog-to-digital conversion en masse, and the LoC has four of 'em.

The key, though, is that even though the LoC works with drive manufacturers on boosting reliability and meeting the Library's technical specifications, is that they have a policy of redundancy and diversity—two to three copies, maybe spread across different states, and stored in different kinds of hardware running different kinds of software. The Packard Campus, which is where music and video are archived and preserved in crazy labs with robots, mirrors everything to a secret location via fiber optic cable. While you probably don't have secret bunkers to stash your porn, it's a good general guideline: More copies on more disks is more better.

A Format Can Be a Tomb

It's obvious, though, that storage media age and die. The more insidious problem, particularly with "born digital" content—stuff that started life as bits—is format obsolescence. That is, just 'cause a video wrapped up in MKV, or an Ogg Vorbis music file, or a DOCX file is readable on computers today doesn't mean they will be 20 years from now. And if nothing can read what's inside the file, the data inside is basically lost.

The way you might've already experienced this, in a way, is via DRM that's been deactivated (like a bunch of digital music stores did after being crushed by iTunes), rendering your songs wrapped up in it completely useless. I suspect people who bought into ebooks early, before the emergence of EPUB, are going to be effed in the ay in a similar manner. And don't even get us started on HD DVD and other failed video and audio physical formats—that's potentially a double whammy of format death.

It's important, then, to store your memories using formats that are legit standards that'll be around for a longass time, if not quite forever. Growing recognition of the problem, particularly as it pertains to ephemeral web content, is part of what's behind the push for open standards—proprietary standards, from a long-term survival standpoint, are not the best idea, 'cause once whoever makes them dies, the format may die too.

The Library of Congress has picked out seven points that'll give you an idea of how sustainable a format is—that is, likely to outlast your current Lady Gaga obsession:
• Disclosure - how open the specs are
• Adoption - "an open format that nobody's adopted isn't too useful to us"
• Transparency - how readable it is on a technical level
• Self-documentation - decent metadata, which is in some ways the secret challenge, given that it becomes more valuable as the amount of data you have grows exponentially
• External dependencies - how much you need particular hardware to read it, for example
• Impact of patents
• Technical protection mechanisms - is DRM in the way?

Quality is also an issue. So, for instance, for master digital archives of video, the Library uses mtion JPEG-2000 in an MXF wrapper, because it's mathematically lossless. It uses MPEG2 for sub-masters, which are the source material for MPEG-4 copies that patrons can access. Or, as another example, for a long time, "PDF was considered persona non-grata" because it was proprietary, but since Adobe's opened it up, they're now working with Adobe on an archivable form of PDF.

The advantage the Library has with analog-to-digital conversions is that they get to dictate the format and specs—that's not so with most of the content out there. For instance, there's not really an agreed upon web video standard—witness the H.264 vs. Ogg Theora codec war, though that's lookin' more and more like it's going toward H.264—so web video is considered "highly at risk." Despite the large amount of web video the Library has captured—after a year working out the process for doing so, Martha and Beth "don't have real high hopes for them surviving." YouTube provides one form of hope, though, in that there's so many YouTube videos, and so many copies, "there's bound to be some community interest in keeping them alive over time."

Pulling the Plug

There might be community interest in keeping the copies of Trolololo alive and playable for the next generation from a format standpoint, but what if Google suddenly pulls the plug on YouTube? How much of it what's there would be lost forever? Or photos uploaded to Flickr and Facebook that have been wiped from hard drives, since they're in the cloud. Consider, for instance, everything that would be lost if Wikipedia really did run out of money, and was shut down. Or Twitter.

This isn't a patently "what if" scenario. Last year, Yahoo, who has a habit of closing services, killed GeoCities—you had a GeoCities page, right?—nuking not just people's personal pages on an individual level, but really deleting a massive archive of web history. Yahoo paid more than $3.5 billion for GeoCities just over 10 years ago. So it could happen, even to popular services—especially ones that operate under the radar, legal or otherwise, like say, Oink.CD.

They're fragile, yeah, but bits, unlike ink on paper or brain cells, can live forever, if they're taken care of. As we're awash in an ever-cresting tsunami of data, sometimes it's easy to forget that can be a pretty big if.

Thanks to Beth, Martha and Greg at the Library of Congress, the friendliest government employees I've ever talked to! Still something you wanna know? Send questions about data, Data or Reading Rainbow here with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.

Original photo from RAMAC Restoration site

Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever.

A person's public life is a flexible persona-–not life itself. If you want to delete photos, wall posts, Facebook gifts or entire Flickr accounts (assuming they are your own and not your ex's that you've hacked into), that's your prerogative. Often, it's the smart, compassionate thing to do – for yourself and others.

If you want to preserve memories for later, screenshot the wall posts and save any photos you want, placing them into a folder marked with your ex's name. If you're the obsessive type, save the folder to an external hard drive and take it out only when you can view your past from a healthy, distanced-but-appreciative perspective rather than after a bottle of wine, drunk alone, with your dog beside you on a Friday night and "If You Could Read Me Mind" playing on iTunes.

If you don't want your ex to take your profile clean-up the wrong way, let him or her know that you're sensitive to, and appreciative of, the past you had together but that you need to move on.

Cleaning shop also makes room for new relationships. Before Facebook, people never saw 100 pictures of their date with their ex unless they were freaky types who kept such photos framed and plastered all over their house. New partners-– and you, too-–deserve the chance to imagine yourselves together making photos and memories of your own. Just try to not start every story with the relationship version of band camp (i.e., "One time, when my ex and I….").

Read more of Dr. Debby's relationship advice here.

Debby Herbenick, PhD is a Research Scientist and Associate Director of The Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University, a sexual health educator at The Kinsey Institute and author of Because It Feels Good: A Woman's Guide to Sexual Pleasure and Satisfaction. She blogs at MySexProfessor.com.

You can't create conscious memories until you're about 2 years old, but babies do respond to to traumatic events—deafening sounds, stress in people around them—with their own stress reactions, and dead bodies freak them out, even if they don't understand the concept of death, exactly. Also, according to some theories, they might have an implicit memory, where a baby who sees somebody stabbed to death with a knife might get agitated when they see a knife months later. There might be mid-term psychological effects, too, like being more violent playing with toys months later, or less outwardly emotional.

So it's possible a baby Bruce Wayne might still have become Batman. Say, if his parents had left the theater because he was crying as an infant, even though he wouldn't remember exactly what happened, he might still have developed the same sense of guilt, and still be plagued by many of the same requisite psychological issues that led him to become Batman.

In other words, memories don't have to be etched into our brains in precise detail in order to haunt us, even the faintest impressions they leave behind might be more we wish. [Slate]

There've been other left-handed mice, yeah but none that are really gaming mice—you know, with a ridiculously sensitive tracking, macro buttons, and the other perks you expect from a gaming mouse. (Ambidextrous mice don't count.) A mirrored version of the DeathAdder, it's got the same 3500dpi sensor with 1000hz polling, braided cabling, and five programmable buttons.

I talked to Razer's CEO Robert Krakoff—a leftie himself—about the mouse for a bit, and as you might suspect, the market for a left-handed gaming mouse is a sliver wide: Just 10 percent of the population is left-handed, not all of 'em are gamers, and a lot (like me) are just plain used to mousing right-handed. So, Razer actually expects to lose money making these, since they're selling them for the same price as the right-handed version—$60, MSRP, but you'll probably be able to find it cheaper retail.

Also, he told me that since Razer's now making Mac drivers for all of their gear, expect their Mac-centric products to fade away, since every mouse and keyboard they make is for Mac now—with Steam coming to Mac, not bad timing at all.

RAZER™ RELEASES THE FIRST GAMING GRADE MOUSE SPECIFICALLY FOR SOUTHPAWS

Carlsbad, Calif. – March 16, 2010 - Razer, the world's leading manufacturer of high-end precision gaming and lifestyle peripherals, today announced the Razer DeathAdder Left Hand Edition™, the very first gaming mouse designed with the professional left-handed gamer in mind. The Razer DeathAdder Left Hand Edition was created to meet community demands for a mouse that was purposefully engineered to give lefties the competitive edge, combining a comfortable ergonomic form factor with a powerfully precise 3.5G infrared sensor.

"Leftie gamers have long been requesting that we develop a gaming grade mouse that is designed exclusively for the left-handed gaming community and we really value the feedback we receive from our fans," said Robert "Razerguy" Krakoff, president, Razer USA. "Not many gamers know this, but I am a southpaw myself and feel truly excited to have a mouse that fits perfectly in my left hand. There is really no substitute for gaming with your naturally dominant hand."

About The Razer DeathAdder Left Hand Edition
The Razer DeathAdder Left Hand Edition features a unique ergonomic form factor to give lefties a comfort they can call their own for extended gaming sessions. The Razer DeathAdder Left Hand Edition boasts five programmable Hyperesponse™ buttons, as well as the trademark 1000Hz Ultrapolling™ technology, providing gamers with the speed necessary to make every moment count. Loaded with a 3500dpi Razer Precision™ 3.5G infrared sensor that offers over four times more precision than a standard 800dpi mouse, the Razer DeathAdder Left Hand Edition is fully equipped to frag, especially when you strike from the blind side.

Razer DeathAdder Left Hand Edition
COST: US $59.99; EU €59.99
AVAILABILITY: Worldwide

Product Features:
· Ergonomic left-hand design
· 3500dpi Razer Precision 3.5G infrared sensor
· 1000Hz Ultrapolling / 1ms response
· Five independently programmable Hyperesponse buttons
· On-The-Fly Sensitivity™ adjustment
· Always-On™ mode
· Ultra-Large non-slip buttons
· 16-bit ultra-wide data path
· 60–120 inches per second and 15g of acceleration
· Zero-Acoustic Ultraslick™ Teflon® feet
· Gold-Plated USB connector
· Seven-Foot, lightweight, braided fiber cable
· Approx. size in mm: 128(L) x 70(W) x 42.5(H)

[Razer]

Emory is emulating his desktop computer, creating a simulation of his original work environment. This is the power of what librarians and archivists call "born-digital" material: It can go beyond preservation—bits are bits are bits, after all—and through emulation, you can actually inhabit his digital world, use the tools he used. You can't write in the leather-back books that Dickens did, but you can scribble in simulations of Rushdie's Mac Stickies. It's preserving more than material, it's preserving, in part, circumstance.

The NYT says, creepily, "It may even be possible in the future to examine literary influences by matching which Web sites a writer visited on a particular day with the manuscript he or she was working on at the time." I can only wonder and fear what'll come out of chatroulette. And we can only fear the day 4chan is revealed as the literary genesis for a generation, recreated perfectly in university libraries. [NYT]

Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever

When I take picture of a really delicious chocolate bread pudding that I'm about to eat, I might upload it to share with tens, or thousands, of people. That photo, the memory of that pudding, exists in my brain, on my phone, on my computer (and its backup), on servers owned by Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Tumblr and Apple. And inside of the minds of everybody cursing me for showing them that, until they forget. We don't just have more (and more vivid) digital scraps of memory, they're scattered all over the world like nuclear fallout, where they're able to experienced by more people than ever. I didn't go to your party, but I saw 156 pictures of it on Facebook.

The first hard disk drive for personal computers was the ST-506, by Seagate. A 5.25-inch disk, it held 5 megabytes of data and cost $1500 in 1980. Today, a 2-terabyte 3.5-inch Seagate Barracuda hard drive costs $180. That's roughly 400,000x the storage for 1/8th the price. Although the brain and drives store data totally differently, some experts say the human brain holds between 10 and 100 terabytes. Think about it: We're now using the same unit of measurement to talk about how much data a hard drive can store that we use for our brains.

The quantity and the quality of data, our digital memories, is exploding: A RAW photo from a Canon 5D Mark II digital SLR consumes roughly 20 megabytes, or 4x the data that the original Seagate drive could hold. It's nearly 7x the size of the 2.7-megapixel photos taken by Nikon's D1—introduced in 1999, it was the first digital camera that really started replacing film cameras at newspapers. Cellphones shoot photos 4x that large, and record high definition video now. Wilson has 40,000 photos, divided evenly between his cats and his child, in his iPhoto library. Giz's Adam Frucci has 120 gigabytes of music, half of which you've never heard of, on his computer. And the memories we record today, using millions of pixels, billions of bits, will seem just as grainy as the black-and-white photos our grandparents took when they were my age, compared to what's next.

My leaky brain will probably forget all about seeing your girlfriend spewing all over your sofa, watching a stray roman candle fireball shoot past my friend's head after ricocheting off a log, and my yummy chocolate bread pudding, until I see them again, years later, the bits perfectly intact. Well, if they survive, anyway, and my computer's still able to decode the format they're stored in, rendering them into pictures and videos. A dead format, a defunct service, takes any memories it encodes with it. And if it's still around, it'll just be one drop in a pool of a million. Oh, and what happens to all of that when I die and my brain becomes worm poop?

We live in a world where a memory, encoded in bits, flowing in a million directions, can live forever. Maybe that means we'll live forever. That's what we want to consider this week. Also, in a sea of 1,000,000 other photos, how am I going to find my chocolate bread pudding again?

Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever.

They're also showing off Goo Splat and Battle Punks. What's curious is the mention that Goo Splat, an internal Microsoft game, was "ported" over from the Zune HD—it confirms, even more strongly, that the Zune HD is basically being left in the dust here on Xbox Live and all these actually awesome games.

[MIX]

P.S. Can you guys send in your own pics of this ad? Thanks!

Update 2: Here's another, spotted at a DC-area AT&T store:

Look at it this way: That $100 up front for the 3G model? It's insurance. Because if you need 3G and don't have it, you're just screwed. But if you have it and never use data, it's no bigs, 'cause you're not on a contract. [Apple via MacRumors]