Reply #131: We have different ways of capturing that info [View All]

[supernova]

now too, though.

100 years ago, grandma wrote a nice chatty letter to her sister about a grandchild's wedding. She mentioned everyone she saw, what she did, what they ate at the rehearsal dinner, and so on.

Today, you have video of grandma at the wedding: dancing, talking to everyone, eating cake and wrinkling her nose at the relish tray... living and breathing and experiencing it all right there in front of you. She doesn't have to write a letter, unless she just wants to. But you have the immediacy of her living presence recorded. To me, that's more valuable.

My point is, you can only get so much of a feel for what people were really like from the distance of historical documents. But, YMMV.

The major problem I see from a historical perspective, probably similar to you, is that we are not thinking about long-term storage of all this new media. CDs and now DVDs aren't supposed to last a long time, unlike parchment, which literally wears like iron if kept properly. So we need a new archival storage system so that future generations will have access to all our electrons and pixels.

Re: the dishwasher, unless you are highly unusual, you will waste more water washing dishes by hand than with the dishwasher. Yes, the dishwasher uses less water than your typical hand washer.