It makes me sad when I think about the knowledge lost with the magnificent ancient libraries[1], but what's even sadder or totally reprehensible are modern-day biblioclasm of ancient manuscripts[2].
it makes me think about today's "paperless" society and all of the data that only exists in a digital form [0].
The only reason it's even possible to take "a new look at ancient books" is because they are physical items that have managed to continue to exist since their creation.
Much of today's "works", however, don't exist in a physical form. They may be stored as bits on a physical medium (such as a spinning hard drive or a magnetic tape) which may itself continue to exist for centuries, but how can we preserve -- for centuries or even millenia -- today's "works" for future archaeologists to sift through in order to study us and our civilization?
Hopefully, some organization somewhere is working on this and making sure that the most important "works" of our time will live on well we after all of us are gone but I wonder just how much of today's "works" will be lost. As new types of storage media are invented every decade or two, it will require that all this existing data be copied to these new storage media in order for it to be preserved and remain accessible.
Just as precious few of these ancient books remain today, there may be very little left from our time on Earth to be examined and studied 500 years from now.
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[0]: It goes without saying, I hope, that I'm not referring to things such as your monthly utility bill that exists only as a PDF.
Especially the latter. Concentrated or not, documents get lost, stolen, and if not, then eventually they simply get degraded. Digitalisation is a means to (i) record things before they are gone for good, and (ii) at the same time provide a way for more people to freely access them (now you don't need to live in a place with a museum or have the means to travel there, even if you are a poor student you can go online and view millions of works of art).
It makes me sad that there is a non-zero chance that in a few hundred years, the end of the 20th century and the 21st century could become modern dark ages because of the inability to access digital media of the time.
And end of 20th century is much more likely to be this. And very likely it has already happened. As the digital storage formats in both physical and digital sense were much less standardised...
Stories of medias not being readable any more because of lost or outdated readers or computers are not uncommon. Not to even mention obscure fileformats...
On other hand now everything is in cloud and simpler to move around and it's hopefully replicated to some degree...
Still question we might have moved to is the amount of data. There is likely already way too much digital information like video out there to sanely replicated. Even the important parts. Just think if Youtube were to go down and no one were there to pickup atleast some of the important bits... Not unlikely scenario if anti-trust stances harden and there really isn't sustainable model...
It's true that media and file formats weren't as standardized in the late 20th century, but nowadays, so much of our world is stored in the cloud, or on devices we own yet barely control, and subject to the mercurial whims and business interests of this corporation or that one.
In Latin the word “elementa” means both atoms and letters, and likely comes from the alphabet’s “L,M,N” sequence.
Huh. The etymology seems unlikely, and Wiktionary[1] casts doubt on it, but it's an intriguing idea. Either way it's cool that the notion (of "element" as applying to fundamentals of both words and objects) goes so far back.
Even without the dubious etymology, the idea of a term referring to both atoms and letters apparently had widespread currency in the ancient Mediterranean given Plato's use of στοιχεῖον with a similar double meaning (although, not, strictly speaking to mean letter).
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_libraries_in_the_anc...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_Jaffna_Public_Lib...