Research Bin

How long can we keep data intact? Surely a very long time..? Not necessarily! A few events over the past few months got me thinking and it turns out that keeping data over long periods of time is pretty challenging. Let's see why.

Digital editions of books are rapidly gaining popularity. While some people still find it preferable to use hard-copy, more and more people move to eBooks in favour of added functionality and usability. When it comes to a book you own, it is nice to be able to commit your thoughts on to it. Highlighting, scribbling, commenting or making notes on your copy allows a more personalised feel to your books. And it makes reference a lot easier. Unlike in printed books, the original text is not ruined by user edits on a soft-copy. Such data introduced by the user are referred to as "annotations". They are actually an overlay of information over the book print.

When it comes to recording information, multimedia files have the obvious upper hand over plain text documents. They have a solid flow with a lot of accompanying data in addition to the objective information. For example, It's much interesting to listen to a narrative as opposed to reading the same information on text form. It's not quite the same. But it is difficult to move at our own pace through an audio unlike text or an image. This can be a headache when it comes to keeping track of contents in long audio/video tracks. Let's look at a couple of features we can make use of to make life easier.

The Earth have one natural satellite; the Moon. The moon is the closest natural celestial body seen to the naked eye from Earth. Scientists believe it has helped shaped life and climate of the planet over the eons. But is there really any use of it? If so, how can we make use of it? Let's look into some possibilities..

The Sun produces massive amounts of energy by a process called nuclear fusion where Hydrogen atoms are combined to form Helium atoms. This energy is emitted to space in the form of electromagnetic radiation. After 8 minutes of journey, a portion of it arrives on Earth with an estimated energy density over a 1000 Watts per square meter. About 30% of this energy is reflected back to space. The rest of it powers up the planet as we know it. On Earth, energy arrives in the form of electromagnetic waves including Infra-red (IR), visible light and Ultraviolet (UV). We refer to it as “ sunlight ”. The following list is a composition of the main forms of energies produced from solar energy and stored on Earth.

Our eyes perceive light. Our brains interpret it into shapes and forms that we are familiar with. What we see is lighter or darker depending on how much of light enters the eye (that is; intensity) and is applied with "colours" based on the flavours of light we receive. As vivid as they may be, these so called flavours of light are physically non-existent in nature. They are solely an interpretation that exists only within our perception.