Papering over the data storage cracks

Paper. Don't you just love it?

Lots of people will tell you they do. The sensual pleasure of holding a book. The convenience (sic) of it. The history. The tradition. And what do I think of that? In a recent post to Usenet a friend going by the name of Ambrose Nankivell put it so much better than I could.

He wrote of a storage medium which

stores the information mainly by a highly redundant (c. 100kilobits/character) 2d matrix of carbon on cellulose. To compact the storage, these matrices are parallelised and layered in sets of around 150, cut to a size of 150mm x 200mm, glued along one edge and encapsulated in thicker cellulose layers, which are normally covered in pigments which encode visual representations.

People pay us about 10 pounds for each of these 1 megacharacter repositories, which cannot be easily copied in an equivalently convenient or comfortable format for ocular conversion to semantic representation, and must be produced in systems as many as a billion times larger than a common or garden optical or magnetic drive, but apparently there's enough people who like their information in this format to make it worth it.

(All figures may vary by up to 2 orders of magnitude, except the dimensionality of the matrices)

Anyway, this storage format produces no heat in use, and even my manually acting as a conduit for it, with the help of Royal Mail and Parcelforce, produces insufficient heat. I have yet to enquire about means of obtaining heat from the stored information, but I understand it's not generally condoned, and considered 'Stalinist'.