26 May
2005
26 May
'05
6:33 a.m.
At 06:17 PM 5/25/2005, Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
I would imagine you'd agree that we are pretty
smart and that the Quipu is
pretty simple, yet we still have not successfully decoded their meaning.
Although I agree with KISS principles, I'm not buying the validity of
the quipu as a good analogy in this situation. I'm no expert on quipu.
Haven't read the books. There seems to be a cottage industry in
theories about them. With 20th century computer data, though,
if some future soul is interested in it, an understanding of ASCII
and probably English will be assumed.
The point about the quipu is that their language and their encoding
has been lost, and there seems to be many theories that assume
they were purposefully encrypting the data and making it subject
to retrieval and encoding through specialized human interpreters
because of their perceived need for security and confidentiality
of the information. Some seem to believe they're a mixture of
mneumonic and numeric data.
Who's to say that the future scholar is human? Isn't it more likely
that the future scholar will be a machine, a mutated Google
hell-bent on spidering 20th century trivia?
- John