Posts Tagged ‘Beatles’
“All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books”*…
… But books (and their predecessors) are fragile, and need special archival care if they are to survive. That’s even truer, as Adrienne Bernhard explains in The Long Now Foundation‘s newsletter, of digital data and documents…
The Dead Sea scrolls, made of parchment and papyrus, are still readable nearly two millennia after their creation — yet the expected shelf life of a DVD is about 100 years. Several of Andy Warhol’s doodles, created and stored on a Commodore Amiga computer in the 01980s, were forever stranded there in an obsolete format. During a data-migration in 02019, millions of songs, videos and photos were lost when MySpace — once the Internet’s leading social network — fell prey to an irreversible data loss.
A false sense of security persists surrounding digitized documents: because an infinite number of identical copies can be made of any original, most of us believe that our electronic files have an indefinite shelf life and unlimited retrieval opportunities. In fact, preserving the world’s online content is an increasing concern, particularly as file formats (and the hardware and software used to run them) become scarce, inaccessible, or antiquated, technologies evolve, and data decays. Without constant maintenance and management, most digital information will be lost in just a few decades. Our modern records are far from permanent.
Obstacles to data preservation are generally divided into three broad categories: hardware longevity (e.g., a hard drive that degrades and eventually fails); format accessibility (a 5 ¼ inch floppy disk formatted with a filesystem that can’t be read by a new laptop); and comprehensibility (a document with a long-abandoned file type that can’t be interpreted by any modern machine). The problem is compounded by encryption (data designed to be inaccessible) and abundance (deciding what among the vast human archive of stored data is actually worth preserving).
The looming threat of the so-called “Digital Dark Age”, accelerated by the extraordinary growth of an invisible commodity — data — suggests we have fallen from a golden age of preservation in which everything of value was saved. In fact, countless records of previous historical eras have all but disappeared. The first Dark Ages, shorthand for the period beginning with the fall of the Roman Empire and stretching into the Middle Ages (00500-01000 CE), weren’t actually characterized by intellectual and cultural emptiness but rather by a dearth of historical documentation produced during that era.
Even institutions built for the express purpose of information preservation have succumbed to the ravages of time, natural disaster or human conquest. The famous library of Alexandria, one of the most important repositories of knowledge in the ancient world, eventually faded into obscurity. Built in the fourth century B.C., the library flourished for some six centuries, an unparalleled center of intellectual pursuit. Alexandria’s archive was said to contain half a million papyrus scrolls — the largest collection of manuscripts in the ancient world — including works by Plato, Aristotle, Homer and Herodotus. By the fifth century A.D., however, the majority of its collections had been stolen or destroyed, and the library fell into disrepair.
Digital archives are no different. The durability of the web is far from guaranteed. Link rot, in which outdated links lead readers to dead content (or a cheeky dinosaur icon), sets in like a pestilence. Corporate data sets are often abandoned when a company folds, left to sit in proprietary formats that no one without the right combination of hardware, software, and encryption keys can access. Scientific data is a particularly thorny problem: unless it’s saved to a public repository accessible to other researchers, technical information essentially becomes unusable or lost. Beyond switching to analog alternatives, which have their own drawbacks, how might we secure our digital information so that it survives for generations? How can individuals, private corporations and public entities coordinate efforts to ensure that their data is saved in more resilient formats?…
Without maintenance, most digital information will be lost in just a few decades. How might we secure our data so that it survives for generations? “Shining a Light on the Digital Dark Age,” from @AdrienneEve and @longnow. Eminently worth reading in full.
C.F. also: “Very Long-Term Backup” by Kevin Kelly (@kevin2kelly).
* Thomas Carlyle
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As we ponder preservation, we might recall that the #1 song in the U.S. and the U.K. (among other territories) was the Beatles’ “Help!” (their fourth of six #1 singles in a row on the American charts).
“I Got Rhythm”*…
… indeed, as Nina Kraus explains, we all do…
Why do we care about rhythm? It connects us to the world. It plays a role in listening, in language, in understanding speech in noisy places, in walking, and even in our feelings toward one another.
Rhythm is much more than a component of music. Nevertheless, music is probably what first comes to mind when we hear the word rhythm: drumming, jazz, rock and roll, marching bands, street performers with wooden spoons and five-gallon buckets, drum circles, time signatures, stomp-stomp-clap — we will, we will rock you — adventures on the dance floor, beatboxing, incantations, mantras, and prayers. Beyond music, we experience the rhythmic changes of the seasons. Some of us have menstrual cycles. We have circadian rhythms — daily cycles of mental and physical peaks and troughs. Frogs croak rhythmically to attract mates and change their rhythm to signal aggression. Tides, 17-year cicadas, lunar phases, perigees, and apogees are other naturally occurring rhythms. Human-made rhythms include the built world — street grids, traffic lights, crop fields, mowed designs in baseball diamond outfields, the backsplash behind the kitchen counter, spatial patterns in geometric visual art forms.
Maintaining rhythm is almost a biological imperative for some of us…
An exploration of the many ways in which temporal patterns plays an important role in how we perceive — and connect with — the world: “The Extraordinary Ways Rhythm Shapes Our Lives,” at @mitpress.
And for an astounding application of rhythm, the story of Niko Tosa: “The Gambler Who Beat Roulette,” (with no electronic or other help). Via @nextdraft.
* George and Ira Gershwin (The piece [performed by Gershwin here] has become a jazz standard– and gave the world a chord progression– the “rhythm changes“– that provide the foundation for many other popular jazz tunes, including Charlie Parker’s and Dizzy Gillespie’s bebop standard “Anthropology (Thrivin’ on a Riff).”)
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As we contemplate cadence, we might recall that it was on this date in 1965 that the Beatles recorded “Help!” The title song of their 1965 film and its soundtrack album, it was released as a single in July of that year, and was number one for three weeks in the United States and the United Kingdom.
The group recorded “Help!” in 12 takes using four-track equipment. The first nine takes concentrated on the instrumental backing. The descending lead guitar riff that precedes each verse proved to be difficult, so by take 4 it was decided to postpone it for an overdub. To guide that later overdub by George, John thumped the beat on his acoustic guitar body, which can be heard in the final stereo mix.
“We can learn from history, but we can also deceive ourselves when we selectively take evidence from the past to justify what we have already made up our minds to do.”*…
Brad DeLong on the dangerous misunderstanding at the root of the current discussion of the “Thucydides’s Trap,” a phrase coined by Harvard’s Graham Allison, meant to evoke the potentially deadly tensions that arise when a major rising power (read “China”) threatens to displace a major ruling power (read “the United States). Allison’s account is very pessimistic; DeLong argues that it needn’t– shouldn’t– be so..
“Thucydides Trap” claims to be shorthand way of describing the grand-strategic dilemmas of the Classical Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta in the second half of the -400s. But it is a bowdlerized version. The actual complexities of the situation have been elided.
Thus important parts of the lessons that can be drawn from Thucydides’s description in The Peloponnesian War of the start of the war have been ignored.
And lessons can be drawn. For, as Thucydides said, he had tried to write his history as:
a treasure for all time… [because] knowledge of the past… [is] an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it…
The situation in the second half of the -400s in the Greek world was thus:
The Spartan oligarchy had held preeminence. It had conquered and continued to dominate Laconia and Messenia. Its enserfment of their populations meant that Sparta alone, among major city-states, had a large and rich enough class of landlords who could train intensively for war, since they not have to assist in the farming themselves.
But there was a big problem with the Spartan system, as Aristotle was to note: Rich Spartan men tended to marry rich Spartan women. Thus, over time, wealth inequality grew. This diminished the size of the pool of Spartan landlords who could afford the full training régimen. The number of full Spartans in the military phalanx was dropping steadily, by perhaps a quarter in each generation.
The Athenian democracy, by contrast, was gaining in strength from generation to generation.
Athens held a central place as the maritime-commercial hub of a Greek world rapidly growing in population and wealth. Each generation saw more economic activity flow through Athens. Each generation saw Athens grow bigger and richer. Each generation saw more silver flow into its treasury. Athens had—excessively cleverly—transformed other city states’ agreements to provide warships to stave off any renewed Persian invasion into cash payments to Athens, which Athens then could and did use as it wished. Thus each generation saw the power of the Athenian state grow as well. And each generation saw a greater share of other Greek city-states become what local democrats elsewhere called “allies” and local oligarchs elsewhere called “subjects”.
In 500 Athens would have had no chance in an all-out war with Sparta. In 430 it could go toe-to-toe. By 360, had catastrophic defeat in the Peloponnesian War been avoided, Athens’s hegemony would have been near indisputible.
In this situation what, from a rational perspective, should the grand strategy of Athens in the second half of the -400s have been? It is clear:
- Do not annoy the Spartan lion.
- Focus on growing trade and commerce
- Focus on making alliances
- Focus on solidifying the nascent Athenian empire.
The future was on the side of Athens.
Korkya came to Athens at the start of the 430s, and said “we will join your alliance if you well help us push Sparta’s ally Korinth out of Epidamnos”. The Athenian answer should have been this: “You have not been our friend in the past. Join our alliance first. Then, in a generation, we will back you in all your disputes. But not now.”
Instead, Athens backed Korkyra with military force. And Korinth went to Sparta. Sparta was, usually, wary of large long-term commitments outside its heartland—the main purpose of its army, after all, was to keep the helots subservient and the taxes flowing, which was hard to do if the Spartan phalanx was far from Laconia. But Athens’s choice of open military confrontation with a key Spartan ally was enough to overcome their reluctance.
And so the Athenian Empire fell.
The lesson for a rising power? Whatever you seek to do now that may be very difficult will be easy in two generations. So postpone doing anything potentially difficult and wait for the tide to bring all the good things to you.
The lesson for a declining hegemonic power it is somewhat more complex. Outside the frame of Thucydides is the Peloponnesian war, Sparta was not the beneficiary of its generation long war against Athens. The beneficiaries were in the short-run, Persia; in the medium-run, Thebes; and in the long-run, Makedon. A declining power should take a long, hard look at itself, and consider whether curbing this particular rising power is in its own long-run interest. The task for a declining power is to create a world in which it can live comfortably when it is no longer hegemon. You can argue over whether Sparta would have had a comfortable and valued place in a counterfactual Athenian Empire circa -300. But it certainly did not have such a place in the post-Athenian Ægean world of Thebans, Argaiads, and Hellenistic despots.
From his invaluable newsletter, Grasping Reality, “The Deceptive Thucydides Trap,” @delong.
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As we heed history, we might recall that on this date in 1966, the #1 song in the U.S was The Beatles’ “We Can Work It Out.”
“If you want to change the culture, you will have to start by changing the organization”*…
That’s perhaps especially true of cultural organizations. As Ian Leslie explains, while rock bands are known for drink, drugs, and dust-ups, they have something to teach us: beyond the debauchery lie four models for how to run a business…
… The notion that bands should make music for the love of it was always romantic and now seems positively quaint. Rock groups are mini-corporations (some of them not so mini). Bands such as Coldplay or Kings of Leon operate sophisticated corporate machines that are responsible for multiple revenue streams; at a recent conference, Metallica’s drummer spoke about the importance of using the right customer-engagement software. Yet the music machine ultimately depends on a small group of talented individuals working closely together to create something magical. Once members of a group decide that they can’t stand to be in the same room as each other, the magic stops and the money dries up.
If rock groups are businesses, businesses are getting more like rock bands. Workplaces are far more informal than they used to be, with less emphasis on protocol, rank and authority. Many firms try to cultivate the creativity that can come from close collaboration. Employers attempt to engineer personal chemistry, hiring coaches to fine-tune team dynamics and sending staff on team-building exercises. Employees are encouraged to share lunch, play table tennis and generally hang out. As the founder of Hubble, a London office-space company, put it, “We hope that our team will become friends first, and colleagues second.”…
Successful startups have to make a difficult transition from being a gang of friends working on a cool idea to being managers of a complex enterprise with multiple stakeholders. It’s a problem familiar to rock groups, which can go quickly from being local heroes to global brands, and from being responsible only for themselves to having hundreds of people rely on them for income. In both cases, people who made choices by instinct and on their own terms acquire new, often onerous responsibilities with barely any preparation. Staff who were hired because they were friends or family have their limitations exposed under pressure, and the original gang can have its solidarity tested to destruction. A study from Harvard Business School found that 65% of startups fail because of “co-founder conflict”. For every Coldplay, there are thousands of talented bands now forgotten because they never survived contact with success.
The history of rock groups can be viewed as a vast experimental laboratory for studying the core problems of any business: how to make a group of talented people add up to more than the sum of its parts. And, once you’ve done that, how to keep the band together…
The Beatles, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, REM, and the Rolling Stones– four bands, four models for business success: “A rocker’s guide to management,” from @mrianleslie in @1843mag.
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As we learn from the loudest, we might recall that it was on this date in 1968 that The Beatles (one of the four cases discussed in the piece linked above) performed “Hey Jude,” the #1 song in both the U.S. and the U.K. at the time, on the television show Frost on Sunday on BBC-TV.
“A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals to discovery.”*…
Ed Simon on errata (and other errors) in literature…
… The King James Version of the Bible has exactly 783,137 words, but unfortunately for the London print shop of Robert Barker and Martin Lucas, official purveyors to King Charles I, their 1631 edition left out three crucial letters, one crucial word—”not.” As such, their version of Exodus 20:14 read, “Thou shalt commit adultery.” Their royal patron was not amused. This edition was later deemed the “Wicked Bible.”
Literature’s history is a history of mistakes, errors, misapprehensions, simple typos. It’s the shadow narrative of expression—how we fail because of sloppiness, or ignorance, or simple tiredness. Blessed are the copyeditors, for theirs is a war of eternal attrition. Nothing done by humans is untouched by such fallenness, for to err is the universal lot of all of us. Authors make mistakes, as do editors, publishers, printers (and readers).
If error were simply an issue of a wrong comma here or an incorrect word there it wouldn’t be nearly as interesting, but mistakes undergird our lives, even our universe. They can be detrimental, beneficial, neutral. When Lockheed Martin designed the Mars Climate Orbiter using American units and NASA assumed that they’d used the metric system instead, a discrepancy that resulted in that satellite crashing into the red dust of the fourth planet from the sun—that was a mistake. And when the physician Alexander Fleming left out a culture plate which got contaminated, and he noticed the flourishing of a blue mold that turned out to be penicillin—that was a mistake. Errors in how people hear phonemes are what lead to the development of new languages; mistakes in an animal’s DNA propel evolution; getting lost can render new discoveries. Sometimes the flaw is that which is most beautiful.
Certainly, there are no shortage of them…
A wonderfully amusing history, and richly illuminating consideration of literary mistakes through the ages: “How Many Errorrs Are in This Essay?,” from @WithEdSimon in @The_Millions.
Vaguely apposite (and also really fascinating): “Panic at the Library.”
* James Joyce, Ulysses
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As we muse on misprints, we might recall that it was on this date in 1968 that The Beatles’ record label, Apple Records, released its first single, “Hey Jude.”
The label was founded… as a creative outlet for the band and as a way to reduce their tax burden. They choose the name and image of a Granny Smith apple because in Paul McCartney’s mind, a green apple signified creative freedom and independence from commercial interests. The record was unique because it featured the image of a Granny Smith apple on side-A and the same apple sliced in half on side-B. But according to The Independent, the song was almost never released because some record executives thought that the image looked pornagraphic. In a letter sent to Apple boss Ron Kass, it said, “Here’s a wild and unanticipated problem to brighten up your day. I just received a call from a very large and influential jack jobber in the western United States. He opened the conversation by saying, ‘Are you guys serious? Do you know what you’re doing? Do you really intend to sell products bearing the new Apple label?’” He said that the Apple label was completely pornographic and the graphic nature of the art was noticed by all of his employees. He doubted that record store chains would want to stock such a record. Not only was he wrong [the single sold 8 million copies], but there is no evidence that the band had intended using a controversial image.
source
Your correspondent leaves it to the reader to deduce the supposed pornographic image. If, like him, you are stumped, see The Independent article linked in the quote above.
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