Archive for March 14th, 2009
Bit Rot
Saturday, March 14th, 2009People want to treat data like a thing. They assume that if you buy some storage, and you put your bits in it, it’s more or less like a safe deposit box – as long as the thing looks okay from the outside, there’s no problem. Just pop the key in when you want to, and – hey presto – the data springs out, pristine and ready.
Would that it were so.
Data is dangerously fragile and ephemeral. It’s a not-entirely-accidental collection of electrical charges that manage to emerge in some useful order… most of the time. But shift just a few of those bits around, or drop a couple on the floor, and the whole construct become no more intelligible than line noise on a telephone wire.
Affliction
Saturday, March 14th, 2009Something I find truly galling in Port Vila is seeing chronic, preventable conditions exacerbating the larger health threats and creating a largely un-measured drag on the national economy. The number of people suffering from boils, skin ulcers and other opportunistic infections is startlingly high. When I visit my adoptive family during the warmer months, inevitably at least one of them is so afflicted. More often than not though, most of them are.
The fevers, pain and loss of sleep brought on by these have cost more than a few days lost to illness. But equally important is their impact on the quality of life.
These afflictions are largely unheard of among those who don’t wander much into Vila’s residential neighbourhoods. That’s because they don’t have to cope with lack of sanitation, dirt floors, mud, overcrowding, inadequate or non-existent drainage, lack of proper screens and countless other shortcomings that the average resident copes with daily.