Archimedes’ Hot Tub

I went to the Wayback Machine today to dredge up some things I’d published but were no longer available online. The Wayback machine went one for two, and I was happy for the one. But it was a reminder of the digital world’s impermanence — these were published less than four years ago. I read Nick Carr’s excellent book “The Big Switch,” and in it he posits that cloud computing will lead to a giant World Wide Computer, and it will be so fast and so “smart” — so good at searching — that we will link our brains to it and become part of it and probably subsumed by it, an oddly eusocial vision of the future of humans. [see my assessment of what it means for business here: Are You Ready for the Big Switch?]

Even if he’s right, there will still be a problem: people die, and so do sites, and someone has to pay to keep them registered. Thus even in a world with free storage, there will be bureaucratic hangups — the tyranny of forms needed to show that a human has not gone offline. So my little episode with the Wayback Machine stands as a precursor to Internet Alzheimers, otherwise known as the 404 File Not Found syndrome.

And if I’m wrong, I harbor no illusions that this post will still be around 40 years from now for people to ridicule.

Experience is usually under-rated in business and sports. Experience means old. Youth means vitality and energy and lack of encumbrances, thus more hours for spending on whatever the task is at hand. But in the Stanley Cup finals between Detroit and Pittsburgh, the youthful Penguins indeed look immature. Maybe there’s something to those studies suggesting that experience has real value. Keep that in mind when dumping older workers who make more money than a new hire would — the new hire may not be able to do the job as well.

My wife sings in a quartet at church. Here’s a recent performance of Risen Indeed.