I find myself sitting in a
lecture where the
world expert is extolling the uses of
Fourier analysis in
Information Theory...
My mind is
wandering, and I
get to
wondering:
I'm thinking how amazing all this mathematics he's scrawling on the OHP foil is and how powerfull it has been in building our technologically advanced world
I ask myself:
How easily could the sum total of human knowledge and endeavour be lost forever?
It's scary really - Imagine that overnight, every
book and
hard drive in the world was robbed of its
content (or imagine a
comet hitting the
planet if that sounds
improbable).
How much of the total of all
esoteric knowledge, the
applications of which we take for granted in our day to day lives, could we possibly
reconstruct from the
memories of the
people who are left behind?
And
then it
came to me in a
flash of
inspiration: We might still have
Everything. So I guess that's what we should aim to make this: a
repository from which the
sum total of the
knowledge of
mankind could be
rebuilt.
So... all we need now are nodes on
How to build a bridge across a 1km wide canyon or
How to build a computer...
Time for me to get noding!