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radicachris

Google Maps and Street View. These burrs in the side of privacy advocates and "get off my lawn" technology-distrusting geezers are what I've found most useful when it comes to rebuilding hazy memories from a life long past.

For me the tandem constitutes a full-fledged memory machine, filled to the brim with nostalgia and convenience. Because, you see, the world is too damn big, my schedule too packed with useless shit, for me to go traipsing back to my childhood jaunts on a whim. Physically, I mean, but there's a web app for that.

We'll Always Have Burke

I doubt I'll ever go back to Burke, Virginia, the town where I grew up a scrappy, Big Wheels-riding kid in a planned neighborhood for Navy families. Nor will I physically reconnect with Clearwater, Florida, where I was born.

Virtually, I've been back to these places dozens of times over the past few years. I've camped out near that Burke neighborhood sidewalk in the same place I did as a 4-year-old kid, staring skyward, thinking of space.

Back then I would slam my Big Wheels (the M.A.S.K. model) to a screeching stop, the plastic wheels grinding and skidding against the concrete, and look up. Perhaps into space like I said, or into the deep blue so that those weird wispy things would dance at the edge of my vision, or—well, I don't remember why, really, just that I did.

And then there's my old house. Nestled neatly at the end of Park Woods Lane, it was a two-story, unremarkable affair with a porch, potted plant hangar and a short driveway that usually held dad's parked Camaro (mom's hatchback got the single car garage).

No one was home the day the satellite snapped that picture (the driveway was empty), so I took my time looking it over, remembering how my dad used to keep his electric lawnmower (it had a cord!) in the rust-colored shed at the side of the house, and how the steep hill in the back led down to a small brook in the woods. Beyond that lay the Burke Racquet Ball and Swim Club, where he would occasionally take me for a swim in the Olympic-sized pool and buy me glass-bottled Veryfine juice from the vending machine.

I made sure to check out that club too. It was still there, boxy and warehouse-looking as ever, but the surrounding woods are thinner now, long since developed with the rest of Burke into an expanse of strip malls and blacktop parking lots.

It's bittersweet to say, and entirely geeky to admit, but before Maps came along and blanketed Burke with its satellite coverage, I would have never thought in any great detail about these specific memories ever again. In passing, maybe, or randomly—perhaps when my future kid, should I have one, opens up his shin and needs his first stitches, as I did up at Patrick's house on the hill.

Recalling that particularly messy memory with my friend Patrick was easy, by the way. All I had to do was drag the map to the right, up the slight hill on the edge of the circle, and float like a specter over his old house to search out the brick wall in back where the accident took place. As I did it just now, just to keep things fresh, I caught myself subconsciously scratching at the two inch scar, still very visible today.

Zooming in on that memory was as simple as a scroll forward. This netted a remorseful pang as I noticed the wall was gone now—the unsurprising casualty of a landscaping project, perhaps—but the memory remained, fresh and renewed, all because I had been granted the "simple," instantaneous act of peering down from a satellite hundreds of miles in orbit.

StreetView Cynic

If I were telling this story ten years ago, instead of today, these tiny, inconsequential memories would have never been recalled. I doubt I'd ever really remember what that house in Virginia looked like, or the street it was on, or the way the wide cul de sac was ringed with white sidewalk and cookie cutter homes. I could have asked my parents about these memories, sure, but the "virtual physicality" of Google StreetView is what sells the service in the end, at least for me.

There are bad memories too, of course, but I search them out anyway—perhaps to heal, or to punish, but always to remind and link back up with that old, younger Jack from the past. In Waltham, MA, for instance, there's this light purple, three-story Victorian house up near the West Newton border that I revisit from time-to-time. I get in my little virtual Google StreetView car, navigate the route I'd take home from work in Cambridge, and park out front on Fuller Street. I can even look up and zoom in on the second story, and think back on all the memories that were created there.

For more than two years I lived on that floor with my ex-girlfriend. They were the final two years of an amazing yet ultimately doomed six-year relationship, but in StreetView's eyes our cars are still parked happily in the driveway under overcast skies.

I haven't visited that house recently—virtually, physically or otherwise—but during the times that I did early last year, when the awkwardness and loneliness of the single life would take over, I'd often wonder what the two of us were doing when that StreetView picture was snapped by Google's vagabond voyeur. Then I'd spin StreetView around 180 degrees and wonder what the neighbors were doing at that point in time too. Then I'd ask myself, as I did then, why we weren't friendlier to them.

Depressing? Yeah, I suppose it is. But it's who we were at the time, and revisiting those memories, via a 13-inch browser window in a new apartment, allows me to reflect on how much I've changed for the better.

Memory Jaunt

If these memory jaunts, or "childhood walks" sound familiar to you, it could be because you've done them yourself already, or because you, like me, have heard of Ze Frank.

I admit, until I flew down to Austin last weekend, I hadn't heard of him, but I have now. He is, in a word, creative.

During his keynote at South by Southwest (SXSW) this year, he featured many of his eccentric web-based projects from over the years, but one in particular seemed most fitting for memory week here at Gizmodo.

He called it A Childhood Walk, and it was basically users going into StreetView to find images of places where they took walks as children. The locations were simple: a trail, a storefront, a playground. Ze then asked that participants think about those walks—those memories—and write them down. Then he published them.

The examples he showed us at SXSW were both intimate and personal. I can't remember any off hand at the moment (Irony!), but I do remember being moved, entertained and most of all inspired by them. Some involved loves, lost loves, even death. There was a Post Secret vibe to them, but the memories were more open, and tied tightly to physical locations that both the person and the rest of the Internet could experience together within StreetView.

As I said before, I don't think you could have this dynamic 10 years ago, or even five years ago, let alone when the Baby Boomers were growing up by candlelight or whatever it was they used to see at night back then.

I think that's kind of unfair in a way. Think of all the location-based memories that, in essence, were forgotten long before they should have been. All the stories, especially those from their childhood. People stamp their feet when they lose a Word document, myself included, but this kind of generational memory loss, to me, is far worse. Far more meaningful, which is ironic, given that I really didn't give it much thought until I stumbled upon a map of my old house on Park Woods Lane. Now I can revisit that place, and others, again and again. Well, at least until Google updates or the neighborhood gets torn down, anyway, but as we've seen all week here at Gizmodo, saving images—even after death!—is pretty easy today.

So for this—for the good Maps memories and the bad, and all the bullshit in between—I'm entirely grateful. Grateful for this, my virtual, voyeuristic memory lane.

Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever.

The technology had its roots in the work of engineer J. Presper Eckert, who developed line delay systems to improve radar during World War II. Instead of storing data in individual bits, it was compressed down to sound waves and sent through a medium that slowed them down (initially mercury, then other substances, and finally wire). At the other end, they were re-electrified, processed, and then sent back through the tube. Because of slowing that occurred in the tube's substance, hundreds of pulses of data could be sent in a single tube—hence the name "delay line"—bouncing back and forth until they were needed.

This post on Make offers a helpful analogy:

If you had a hard time remembering things for very long, and happened to live in a cave, you could just shout out what you didn't want to forget, and a few seconds later you would hear an echo to remind you. Of course, the problem with this is that an echo doesn't stick around for long, so you would have to shout again every time that you heard the echo, so that you could remember again in a few seconds. Assuming you could keep this up, you would never forget your idea.

Until computers like the 305 RAMAC introduced random access memory, machines like the UNIVAC I, shown above, used serial-access systems like delay line memory. What this meant is that a certain piece of data couldn't be called up at any time; you had to wait until it was ready. In this case, it was ready when it had bounced to the "read" end of the tube. It only took a matter of milliseconds, but it was a fundamentally different system of computing, and it wasn't until the development of RAM some years later that our modern sense of computer memory started to take shape. [Wikipedia, Make]

Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever.

This is the experience of someone suffering from a Capgras delusion, a rare medical disorder in which a person becomes convinced that a loved one has been replaced by someone pretending to be that loved one. The unsettling condition is the topic of this week's episode of Radiolab, entitled "Do I Know You?", and the producers invited Dr. Carol Berman and Dr. V.S. Ramachandran on the program to talk about it.

No one knows exactly what causes Capgras delusions. The doctors cite one example in which the delusions started after a coma and another in which they came in the midst of general dementia. But they can also start out of the blue, which is a terrifying prospect.

Dr. Berman, a psychologist, hypothesizes that Capgras delusions are an individual's way of dissociating a loved one from some perceived flaw—some sort of psychotic denial. This woman is being cruel, and I know my mother to be kind, so this must be an imposter.

Dr. Ramachandran, luxuriously rolling his "r's," suggests that the delusions are caused by faulty circuity in the brain. We identify our loved ones, he says, by their familiar faces but also by the familiar emotions they evoke. If our brain no longer registers those emotions, we deem them an imposter. This woman looks like my mother, but she doesn't make me feel the way my mother makes me feel, so this must be an imposter.

Often times, the individuals subject to the delusions are perfectly normal otherwise. And the conditions that trigger the episodes are oddly narrow. If a person subject to Capgras delusions talks to the loved one on the phone, he recognizes her instantly and converses as normal. It's only in seeing her that the break occurs.

Over the course of the week we've looked at many ways in which memory—human and otherwise—is fallible. But hearing about Capgras delusions and the individuals who suffer from them serves to remind that some memories are more essential than others. [RadioLab]

Image credit tabrandt

Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever.

Around three years ago, lifecasting was all the rage. We idolized iJustine, Justin.tv and the countless other people brave enough to film every action, every day. The trouble with their form of lifecasting is that it's done via a camcorder strapped to a hat, filming all your actions plus everyone else's. You could almost say the SenseCam is the lifecasting device for shy people who are merely interested in jogging their memory at a later date; people who want to tell a story without having to hear themselves.

So, What The Heck Is It?

Measuring the size of a square pack of cards, it hangs from a lanyard around the neck and films everything within your eyesight in 640 x 480 resolution photos, compressing them as JPEGs on the device's internal 1GB SD card. It can store over 30,000 images—which works out to around 100 hours' worth of lifecasting, based on approximately 300 photos taken each hour (which is the average number automatically shot), plus the time each photo was shot at.

Its 0.3MP VGA image sensor may not be as good as your cameraphone or even laptop webcam (though it does shoot in a wide-angle fish-eye style effect which I loved), but those devices require you to click a button every time you want a photo taken. The SenseCam takes photos passively, based on changes to the light, temperature or movement—or you can set it to take photos on a timer instead.

It contains several different sensors—light-intensity and light-color sensors, a passive infrared detector for measuring changes in body heat, a temperature sensor and an accelerometer for detecting movement. It's certainly interesting moving between rooms with different lighting conditions, and seeing how many more photos the SenseCam takes.

Every Step You Take, It'll Be Watching You

When connected to a computer it pops up as an external hard drive, with individual folders dedicated to each batch of 100 photos, or roughly 20 minutes' worth of memories. I used the SenseCam over two days, and by the end I had thousands of photos to sort through. Opening all the folders and previewing them on my Mac, I just ran through them quickly, so they turned into something akin to a flipbook. It was shocking seeing how often I open my Twitter tab when working, and how many times each hour I chew on my nails.

Cooking dinner provided the best results. The SenseCam detected the change in temperature and likely the light as well, so took as many as eight shots a minute. Chopping sundried tomatoes turned the shots into a movie when I ran through them quickly on the laptop later—and stirring pasta with a wooden spoon saw my hand move very slightly in each shot.

Sadly—and this is more of a reflection on my life than the SenseCam—none of the photos are really worth showing anyone. In fact, what you see below in the gallery are the only photos I deemed interesting enough. No-one, especially not me, wants to see hours' worth of photos of my laptop screen as I work, flipping tabs and checking email. An alarming amount of photos showed my BlackBerry in front of the camera, as I replied to emails when I was away from my laptop. A good number featured my cat in them.

Here Comes The Fun

But the potential here is huge. Whereas strapping a camcorder to a hat is deemed as intrusive, having a small box the size of a deck of cards strung from my neck on a lanyard is far from it. Filming makes both you, and the people around you, very aware of every action. Affectations are created that way; egos are born. Having a camera that you don't have to control means it's forgotten, so a truer representation of your life can be broadcast—should you choose to put the photos on Twitter, Facebook or Flickr.

As there's no plans for Microsoft to send the SenseCam down the production line (excluding the fact that they've licensed the technology to Vicon, who'll sell it to the medical industry), it's not too important hypothesizing on why you could ever want or need one.

I do wish however that I was wearing it several nights ago when my friend won tickets to the London premiere of Remember Me, and we were stood 5m away from Robert Pattinson (he of Twilight fame). The one shaky photo I managed on my BlackBerry, which while it has a better image sensor than the SenseCam's, was ruined thanks to my nerves and emotions running wild. The SenseCam, while triggered by changes in bodyheat or temperature, doesn't have stage fright when confronted with celebrities-you-really-shouldn't-fancy-but-actually-do.

There's a future here with the SenseCam, if Microsoft can find the right partner to license the technology to for personal use. They could even launch it successfully themselves. I wouldn't use it everyday, and certainly have no need for reviewing 100 hours of my life through the form of 30,000 photos, but it'd be great fun to wear while at a party—especially for those of us who often suffer from memory loss the next morning. Adding a 3G chip and GPS, so each photo could be sent to an online profile and tagged with your whereabouts would be future features I'd like to see...but then, who would be interested enough in viewing someone else's life from their perspective?

Innovative device with huge potential

Easy to use, easy to transfer to computers

Fish-eye effect is fun

It'll probably never see the light of day in Best Buy or on Amazon

Photos could be higher-res, admittedly

This seems like a complicated subject. It's not. There's some data that's private, both in terms of content as well as the very fact of its existence, and your viewing of it. Let's say you look at porn. (You do.) This fact—not just the art porn itself—belongs to you. There's no need for it to be a discoverable part of your digital life, or, god forbid, your digital legacy. Here's how to make sure your private collections are in order, and our of sight.

Level One: Obfuscation

Who hasn't created a folder called "Business" only to fill it with an entirely differently kind of business? It's a hallowed tradition, enjoyed by nearly everyone who's used a computer in the last 20 years. And as ridiculous and inept as it sounds, it probably worked—then.

There was a time when hiding a folder deep within an operating system's file structure actually hid it. Family members and spouses never had a reason to explore C:/Windows/System32, much less the "Nrop" folder you cunningly stashed there. And unless anyone went out of their way to search for incriminating content, it just wouldn't come up.

Today, things are different. Both major OSes have deeply integrated and everpresent search features—Spotlight in OS X and Start menu search in Windows 7—which bring the depths of your file system bubbling to the surface with alarming ease and frequency. They prioritize file types over file locations, so your buried videos are just about as discoverable as if they were stored your "My Videos" folder. As far as hiding your shit, and keeping your bereaved family from discovering your bizarre-but-harmless-but-still-pretty-bizarre video collection, this offers only the slightest protection.

The section age-old variation on pornfuscation is the trusty file rename. Here's how it goes: Save your files, change their names to something innocuous, and switch their file extensions to something inscrutable. LadiesEatingFriedPigsFeetInLingerie.avi becomes lefpfil.dat. And it helps to sew together a little cipher, too. Something like:

.avi=.dat
.mpeg=.dll
.mp4=.lib
.jpg=.docx

While this will probably accomplish your goals with almost no initial effort, it's pretty unwieldy in the long term, and far from failsafe.

Level 2: Encryption

The word "encryption" evokes spy films, shady government agencies and more than anything, nerds. But here's the thing: It's actually super easy. It's also nearly 100% effective, unless someone very serious is looking very seriously for something seriously incriminating on your computer, in which case I probably don't want to help you out anyway. So!

Mac OS X: Creating a password-protected archive is your best option here. It's dead simple, consolidates your files, and puts your stuff one extra layer of abstraction further away from search indices and the like. To make a passworded .DMG file (an image/archive file that you can open with a simple click) from an existing folder, just do this:

• Open Disk Utility (Spotlight search Disk Utility)
• File>New>Disk Image from Folder
• Select the folder, click Image
• Select encryption (128-bit AES will do)

• Choose a unique password

And that's it! Now you have a whateveryouwant.dmg file that can't be viewed, opened or edited by anyone but yourself. Your very own little lockable porn capsule! (Ugh.)

Windows

To create a password-protected archive in Windows Vista or 7, you'll want to download a 3rd-party archive utility, like WinZip or WinRAR. And by like WinZip or WinRAR, I mean just download PeaZip. It's free, and better than the software you're used to. Then:

• Open PeaZip
• File>Create Archive
• Select the files you want in the archive
• Click the Lock icon under the Output selector
• Select "Encrypt Also File Names"
• Select archive type "PEA" (the fact that you're using this program's proprietary format, as opposed to something like ZIP, means that it'll be even less identifiable as, well, what it is.)

And there you go.

Level 3: Liquidation

Seriously, people, stop storing incriminating material on your computer. You're already getting this stuff from the internet, so just leave it on the internet. Stream videos online, and look at pictures without downloading them. It's easy.

Firefox, Chrome, Safari and even Internet Explorer have private browsing modes, which don't accumulate history, cookies, or local caches of any kind. Use them. Your digital self will thank you.

If you have more tips and tools to share, please drop some links in the comments-your feedback is hugely important to our Saturday How To guides. And if you have any topics you'd like to see covered here, please let me know. Happy secret-keeping, folks!

When I was a kid, my dad had a Rolodex. Actually, my dad still has a Rolodex. My dad is one of the least organized people I know. In his apartment, he is good at stacking things (like newspapers and bills and books) on top of other things (like pingpong tables and folded easels) on top of other things (like trunks and cardboard boxes filled with newspapers and bills and books). I was adult before I learned that you're supposed to continue to replace the toothpaste cap on the tube after you use it.

However, Mr. Grossman is organized about one thing: correspondence. He has a log book in which he draws pictures, staples post cards, and keeps notes on every phone call he has. But his greatest feat of organization is his Rolodex. No residence or phone number in his life (or my life, or my siblings' lives, or his ex's lives) has ever gone undocumented. Sometimes he throws out useless cards, but mostly they live on stuck to the little wheel, reminding me of my uncle's ex-wife's parents' phone number or my camp address from 1989 or my great aunt Betty who died last year. The cards are mostly white—or more precisely, they're nicotine white, which is actually more of a kind of gold color. Some are pink, because apparently there was a period where the stationer tried to appeal to... people who like pink. Each one has a degree of soul and meaning that no entry in my Gmail address book will ever possess.

The Wheel of Life

When I got my first job at a newspaper in 2001, I had a small Rolodex. I got it because everyone around me had one. What's more, people talked about their Rolodexes. "I think I have her in my Rolodex," they'd say. Or, "If he leaves, he's going to take his Rolodex with him." This, of course, meant that someone's "contacts" were veeeeery important. Sometimes, people would take a card out of their Rolodex if I needed it, and I'd go copy the information and bring it back to them. There were people who stapled cards onto Rolodex pages and people who hand wrote all the information. Cards could be added or tossed or shared with ease. It was a genius, efficient and highly personal way of staying in touch.

I didn't keep my Rolodex for very long. There were several reasons for this. For one, I'm actually pretty good at memorizing numbers. Like 19. And 34. And 5. 19 34 5. I just rewrote them without even looking! This is funny because my memory for everything else in life is so bad that I usually can't remember the beginning of a sentence by the time I get to the end which is why I have no idea what this sentence is about. Another reason is that my dad taught me this nifty number memorization system [http://www.the-number-thesaurus.com/Rules.asp] when I was a kid. But the main reason is that I, like (almost) everyone else, eventually started keeping numbers and addresses on my computer and phone. Now I'm at the point where I hardly do that. I just search my Gmail or text people or Google around until I find the digits and street names I need.

But just because this is the more "modern" method of keeping numbers and such doesn't mean that it's a better system. Really, the Rolodex might be one of the more important memory systems ever created.

Arnold Neustadter, Inventor

The Rolodex was the brainchild of Arnold Neustadter, a somewhat anal twentieth century inventor from Brooklyn. His daughter Jane Revasch, now in her sixties, clearly grew up putting the toothpaste cap back on the tube. "If I took a message for him, he wanted to know everything—first name, last name, where they were calling from , why, their number, the time...and I was just a little kid!" she told me.

Still, way back when, Neustadter's address book presented a kind of mess that he couldn't harness. Mid-century families were infamous peripatetic. Vaguely dissatisfied despite being well-clothed and fed and in possession of a nice station wagon and decent wet bar, they determined that the real American dream existed just two suburbs over: Between 1948 and 1970, an estimated 20 percent of all Americans moved each year. How was anyone supposed to keep track of all those new street names without having to rewrite their whole address book every few months? Plus, some people died! Pages cracked with layers of caked White-out. New phone numbers meant that, when there was no longer room under M, a coda symbol would have to indicate that those entries were being placed in W. The S's were mostly residing on an inserted piece of paper clipped to the back cover and any completely new entries were just going to have to wait until you could find a replacement book. Sure you could just start a new book every few months, but who had the time!

This was pre-Google, so think of all the hours it took to do what I did just this morning: research what happened to the boy from ET, wonder whether or not Coca Cola used to actually contain cocaine, and figure out which president came before Grover Cleveland. (Interjection from Mr. Grossman: "The library was really far. Before the Internet, if I had questions like that, I just made up the answers.")

Neustadter had combatted office disorder before. His Swivodex was a device that kept ink bottles from spilling. The Clipodex was a device that attached to the knees and helped stenographers keep pads from moving. The Punched made holes in papers. In the late 1940s, he and a designer came up with a way of dealing with the address book dilemma: a propped-up rotating wheels fitted with inexpensive removable cards. Some models had a cover equipped with a lock. (Each lock actually took the same key—but don't tell!).

All in all, it was an elegant solution. The cards were removable so that the Q didn't have to take up any space at all if it had no entries; the circular design allowed the more demanding letters to have more space when necessary.

When Neustadter first started selling the Rolodex in the 1950s, stationery shops were skeptical that anyone would want the spindly device on their desk. By the 1980s, however, the Rolodex had become such an icon that lawsuits were filed by companies who accused former employees of taking them with them when they left—having a Rolodex filled with important names meant everything. There were models selling for more than $200 and people often valued them at prices far higher than that. An entire 1986 episode of Moonlighting was devote to one stolen one being held ransom for $50,000. Hell, it was worth it! Those numbers didn't exist in some kind of "cloud" or on a hard drive in the closet. And the library was really far.

Facebook Schmacebook

Rolodexes were a testament to your relationships and your personal history. In 2008, Stanford University professors found that the average Facebook member aspires to have around three hundred friends, but that would've seemed a piddling number to the average Rolodex devotee, who often made it a point to use as many cards as the contraption could allow—and some held up to six-thousand. I remember an officemate who used to leave his Rolodex flipped open to important people. He didn't realize this made him look like a douche. But I guess people do the same kind of thing on Facebook. Did I mention I'm friends with Wendy the Snapple Lady?

Mr. Neustadter, who died in 1996, never saw the way in which digital storage would affect his iconic invention. But his daughter insists he would've argued that his Rolo-baby was as relevant as ever. When I called to tell her that I was going to include the Rolodex in OBSOLETE, my book about objects that are fading from our lives, she got huffy. She spoke in a tone that requires exclamation points. "They still work! You just can't carry them around! Places still sell them," she said. I told her she was right—the book is about things that still exist, but just barely. She continued. "They aren't obsolete! Give your book another title! You know, look at it this way: computers get viruses! But the Rolodex, it's never taken a sick day in it's life."

Anna Jane Grossman is the author of Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us By (Abrams Image) and the creator of iamobsolete.net. Her writing has appeared in dozens of publications, including the New York Times, Salon.com, the Associated Press, Elle and the Huffington Post. She has a complicated relationship with technology, but she does have an eponymous website: AnnaJane.net. Follow her on Twitter at @AnnaJane.

Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever.

The theory was especially popular in the 1960s and 70s, when scientists were just beginning to unravel the mysteries of the double helix. Our DNA determines our physical appearance, the reasoning goes, and our predispositions to various illnesses, and plays a role in our general disposition and skill set. All of that has been passed down to us through countless generations. So why not memories?

It sounds far-fetched, but there are still vast swaths of genetic code whose purpose is unknown. And the evolutionary advantages of having memories passed down—even one as simple as "FIRE BAD"—are overwhelmingly clear. Will we be able to tap into those memories any time soon? Probably not. But one day some generation might. And when they do, they'll see exactly how that great-great-great-grandpa Brian spent all his spare time on cheese snacks and 90s sitcom reruns. [American Chronicle]

Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever.

What do we do when pictures of events we barely recall are all we have?

Original source of image unknown.

Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever.

Carr's book, the Night of the Gun, is about that change, mostly. His story is one of the downtrodden man coming around to a sweeter life; classic. But what's also striking is Carr's self awareness. That in order to confront his past—which is muddled through drug addiction and time—he has to first fact check it using a reporter's toolbox, interviewing ghosts from his past, police records and medical files. One lesson, as it pertains to this week's theme: Memories can deceive and escape us because it's sometimes safer and easier to let them. And so, facing down the darker facts of one's life takes a type of courage seldom seen, but demonstrated, by Carr, in this book. — Brian Lam

I am not a gun guy. That is bedrock. And that includes buying one, carrying one, and, most especially, pointing one. I've been on the wrong end a few times, squirming and asking people to calm the fuck down. But walking over to my best friend's house with a gun jammed in my pants? No chance. That did not fit my story, the one about the white boy who took a self-guided tour of some of life's less savory hobbies before becoming an upright citizen. Being the guy who waved a gun around made me a crook, or worse, a full-on nut ball.

Still, there it was: "I think you might have had it."

We were not having an argument, we were trying to remember. I had gone to his house with a video camera and a tape recorder in pursuit of the past. By now the statutes were up, no charges in abeyance, no friendship at stake.

Donald is not prone to lies. He has his faults: He has wasted a gorgeous mug and his abundant talent on whiskey and worse, but he is a stand-up guy, and I have seen him bullshit only when the law is involved. Still, I know what I know—Descartes called it "the holy music of the self"-and I believe that I was not a person who owned or used a gun. The Night of the Gun had stuck in my head because it suggested that I was such a menace that my best friend not only had to call the cops on me but wave a piece in my face.

I didn't hold it against him—Donald was far from violent, and maybe I had it coming. I doubt that he would have shot me no matter what I did. But now that memory lay between us. Sort of like that gun.

Memories are like that. They live between synapses and between the people who hold them. Memories, even epic ones, are perishable from their very formation even in people who don't soak their brains in mood-altering chemicals. There is only so much space on any one person's hard drive, and old memories are prone to replacement by newer ones. There's even a formula for the phenomena:

R = e-(t/s)

In the Ebbinghaus curve, or forgetting curve, R stands for memory retention, s is the relative strength of memory, and t is time. The power of a memory can be built through repetition, but it is the memory we are recalling when we speak, not the event. And stories are annealed in the telling, edited by turns each time they are recalled until they become little more than chimeras. People remember what they can live with more often than how they lived. I loathe guns and, with some exceptions, the people who carry them, so therefore I was not a person who held a gun. Perhaps in the course of transforming from That Guy to This Guy, there is a shedding of old selves that requires a kind of self-induced Alzheimer's.

In this instance, the truth didn't seem knowable.

I remember driving to a dark spot in between the streetlights at the rounded-off corner of Thirty-second and Garfield. Right here, I thought. This would be fine.

The Nova, a shitbox with a bad paint job my brother bought me out of pity, shuddered to a stop, and I checked the rearview. I saw two sleeping children, the fringe of their hoods emerging in outline against the backseat as my eyes adjusted to the light. Teeny, tiny, itty-bitty, the girls were swallowed by the snowsuits. We should not have been there. Their mother was off somewhere, and I had been home looking after them. But I was fresh out. I had nothing. I called Kenny, but he was plenty busy. "Come over," he said. "I'll hook you right up." In that moment of need, I decided to make the trip from North Minneapolis to South, from Anna's house to his.

I could not bear to leave them home, but I was equally unable to stay put, to do the right thing. So here we were, one big, happy family, parked outside the dope house. It was late, past midnight.

Then came the junkie math; addled moral calculation woven with towering need. If I went inside the house, I could get what I needed, or very much wanted. Five minutes, ten minutes tops. They would sleep, dreaming their little baby dreams where their dad is a nice man, where the car rides end at a playground.

Memory is the one part of the brain's capacity that seems to be able to bring time to heel, make it pause for examination, and, in many cases, be reconfigured to suit the needs of that new moment. Long before TiVo, humans have been prone to selecting, editing, and fast-forwarding the highlights of their lives. Even if every good intention is on hand, it is difficult if not impossible to convey the emotional content of past events because of their ineffability. Even in an arch me-as-told-to-me paradigm, the past recedes, inexorably supplanted by the present.

Memory remains an act of perception, albeit perception dulled by time, but it is also about making a little movie. Remembering is an affirmative act-recalling those events that made you you is saying who you are. I am not this book, but this book is me.

Episodic and semantic memory each lie in different ways, but each is eventually deployed in service of completing a story. Stories are how we explain ourselves to each other with the remorseless truth always somewhere between the lines of what is told. In this way, memory becomes not a faculty but a coconspirator, a tool for constructing the self that we show the world.

In Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie writes about the "special kind" of truth that memory conjures. "It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also. But in the end it creates its own reality, its own heterogenous but usually coherent version of events, and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own."

I get his gist, but I'm not sure I give any more credence to my memories than to the recollections of others.

When I committed to write a reported memoir about my past, I proceeded on a few assumptions:

1. Every person's story has value, including my own.
2. My life is the one thing in the world I am the leading expert on.
3. If I am truthful, no real harm can come to me.
4. Keeping careful video and audio records of everyone I talk to will give the memoir a verisimilitude born of transparency.
5. I am a good man who did bad things, but I'm better now.

I had no understanding of the fundamental audacity of writing a memoir. I do now. It presumes a level of interest in my life that I had not historically displayed and also has an embedded promise that something will be learned.

Even with the gimmick of reporting, my addiction narrative arrives at some very common lessons. Too much of a bad thing is bad. Everybody laughs and has fun until they don't. If you don't sleep and eat, but drink and drug instead, you will lose jobs, spouses, and dignity.

And the lessons of the recovery narrative are important, but even more prosaic. In the ensuing chapters, you will be unsurprised to learn that once I stopped doing narcotics and alcohol, things improved. I got jobs, remarried, had a baby, and, of course, learned to love myself.

Junkies and drunks frequently end up putting a megaphone to their own pratfalls because they need to believe that all of the time they spent with their lips wrapped around glass, whether it was a bottle of vodka or a crack pipe, actually meant something. That impulse suggests that I don't regret the past-it brought me here to this nice, happy place-but I'd also like to squeeze something more from it.

Even if the conception of the memoir is venal, or commercial, or flawed, there is intrinsic value in reporting. For instance, in spite of what I believed, it was probably me who had the gun, not Donald. I can't say with certainty, but that picture began to cohere after some reporting. I called Joseph, a professor at New York University, who knows a great deal about the mechanism of human recollection, to ask him how I could have gotten such a signal event in my life so completely wrong.

"Well, the drugged state you were in is going to alter the way you formed memories," he suggested. "You could probably have misattribution. You have lots of pieces that are recorded and stick together by that experience. Perhaps in that situation the sticking mechanism was not working well, and so all the pieces were there, but it wasn't put together quite right.

"Especially under the conditions you were in, you could have faulty mechanisms of various kinds. Because those little pieces are there, when you retrieve the memory, you put them back together, and for whatever reason, the gun ends up in his hand. You can get Freudian about that or not." He added that so-called flashbulb memory of the kind that I had can be incredibly vivid and still be very wrong. "The other thing that may be relevant is something called state-dependent learning, where certain memories are processed only when you go back into the state in which they were formed."

I'd do almost anything to remember what happened on The Night of the Gun or the snowsuits, but that is a state I don't plan on visiting anytime soon.

Each time I would return from a reporting trip, I would go through a ritual. On-site notes would be transcribed, interviews logged, and then I would empty the digital audio and video onto my computer. In order to make sure that the accumulated data of my life did not tip over my computer, I would transfer the large audio and video files to an external hard drive. As the data accumulated, I began to think of that hard drive as all-knowing, a digital oracle that knew more about my life than I did, a device that told the truth because that was all it contained.

Even so, my past is a phantom limb, something I feel the presence of but cannot touch. John Updike called it part of our "dead, unrecoverable selves." When the past is shifted to the present moment, it is infected by a consistency bias that requires that all things fit together, whether they do or not. Examine your own family history and folklore if you don't buy it. How many of those stories are literally, exactly true?

Memoir is a very personal form of creation myth. Whether it is in the form of a book or something told across the intimacy of first date candlelight, the this-is-me, this-is-who-I-am story is a myth in the classic sense, a tale with personal gods and touchstones. It becomes more and more sacred as it is told. And perhaps less and less truthful.

Going back over my history has been like crawling over broken glass in the dark. I hit women, scared children, assaulted strangers, and chronically lied and gamed to stay high. I read about That Guy with the same sense of disgust that almost anyone would. What. An. Asshole. Here, safe in an Adirondack redoubt where I am piecing together the history of That Guy, I often feel I have very little in common with him. And that distance will keep me typing until he turns into this guy.

David Carr writes at The New York Times, blogs at Media Decoder, and Tweets @carr2n.

This writing was excerpted from his book, NIGHT OF THE GUN, where you can find the rest of the story (complete with happy ending).

Copyright 2008 by David Carr. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

whaleyz1

Stage One: Denial

"No. No, there's no way. This is probably just a software issue, maybe if I try rebooting again it'll work. I've only had this hard drive for two years, there's no way it just died. I'll get all that stuff back. This silly computer always freaks out but is fine after a reboot. Even though I've tried rebooting five times and it sounds like a fork is suck in a garbage disposal in there, it's probably just the CD drive."

Stage Two: Anger

"Are you fucking kidding me, Western Digital? I've lost everything! I trusted you, and for what? How does a company that sells such crappy products stay in business? I will murder the first WD employee I see. And what the hell is wrong with me that I didn't back this stuff up? I am the biggest idiot in the world and I want to punch myself in the goddamned face. I hate myself and don't deserve to be happy."

Stage Three: Bargaining

"OK, so maybe I can download some software and boot this drive as a secondary drive and try to recover some stuff. I mean, I'll have to go buy a new hard drive and install it and then figure out how to hook this one up as a secondary drive, and I'm not sure where my OS discs are, but hey, I'm a smart guy, I can figure this stuff out, right? Or maybe professional data recovery services have gotten much, much cheaper lately. Yeah, I'll bet they're affordable now, they've gotta be."

Stage Four: Depression

"All those photos. I'll never, ever get them back. I'll never see those faces again. And my essays from college, I was going to share those with my kids someday. And man, all that music, it's taken me years to collect all that. Why did I even bother? It's like the last ten years of my life have just been erased."

Stage Five: Acceptance

"Ah, none of that stuff was that important. Most of it was uploaded to various sites like Flickr, anyways. At least the really important stuff. Regathering all that music will be fun, too! And hey, you know what? Maybe it's good to start fresh every once in a while. And man, hard drives have gotten a lot cheaper since I last bought one. This is really just a good way to put things in perspective; none of this stuff was all that important. Except for those photos. Why the hell didn't I back them up?"

Photo via Flickr

Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever.

A laser beam whose wavelength is being monitored by this Soviet-looking machine is being bounced from mirror to mirror to mirror before it lands on a spinning disc the size of CD, but orange, and transparent. It's reading the holograms that are embedded buried inside the disc, gigabytes of random test data.

This work table is deep inside the labyrinthine complex that is GE's Global Research Lab, 550 acres of big machines and big brains, in the hinterlands of Niskayuna, New York. It's where the company that brought us 30 Rock invents the future of energy, aviation, healthcare, and dozens of other mega-industries, including, as it turns out, data storage.

Hard drives, DVDs, USB sticks: This is where we store our digital lives. But while our data is timeless, our storage devices aren't. So, what's next? And then what?

Data storage is something most people don't spend much time thinking about, and if we do, it's in abstract terms. Laptops have a fixed amount of space; we pay for more, but accept less. DVDs hold a certain length of video, or a healthy chunk of a music collection; these are disposable. Flash drives move stuff from one place to another; we sense that they're different than hard drives; but we're not sure how.

What we know is that we need to store stuff, somewhere. And by we, I mean we: our network infrastructure won't be ready for widespread cloud computing, or that fantasy of downloading everything you'll ever watch in full HD, for a very, very long time, and until then—or for people with unease about that concept, even then—storage is something we need to think about.

In 2010, storage tech is in flux. Here's how we—and the people and companies we're slowly (but surely) handing our data over to, store stuff now, and more importantly, later.

Hard Drives Aren't Dead

Hard drives! You almost certainly own at least one of these, in you laptop, desktop, or even portable music player. The basic principle revolves (ha!) around the reading and writing of data onto a magnetized, metallic platter, which is assembled inside a hard drive's case alongside a head, which is roughly analogous to the needle on a record player, except instead reading variations in a physical groove, this head floats above the platter, reading little tiny magnetic variations from a short distance.

If the immediate evocation of a record player didn't tip you off, this technology has a long legacy (read: It's old as hell): The first machine to utilize the concept was built in 1956; the first modern-looking, reasonably small hard drive (at 5MB, no less!) shipped in 1980, from Seagate.

The story since then has been surprisingly uncomplicated, with steady advances in data storage density, decreases in size and a drastic drops in price. The first 1GB hard drive, built in 1980, weighed over 500 pounds. Today, a 2 terabyte—that's 2,000 times more capacious—hard drive is small enough to tuck into a loose jeans pocket, and can be had for under $140.

But surely this technology is reaching a breaking point, right? Not quite. With storage density approaching practical maximum's, hard drive manufacturers resurrected an old theory somewhere around 2005: Perpendicular storage. Seagate senior vice president, Recording Media R & D and Operations Mark E. Re:

We use to use a recording method called longitudinal recording, which is called that because the magnetization and the storage layer on the disk or platter is a plane. It's parallel to the surface. And when we moved to perpendicular [storage], we change the magnetization layer on the disk so now it aligns perpendicular to the surface

Why?

When you're trying to get your bits closer and closer together with longitudinal storage, the magnetization didn't want to say there. It wanted to spring apart, like if you're putting two bar magnets together. But if align them perpendicular…they want to be closer together.

Translation: More data, less surface space.

Seagate saw longitudinal recording limiting their hard drives to somewhere around 100 gigabits (12.5 gigabytes) per square inch, and at the rate things were going, without perpendicular storage, hard drive makers would be up against a wall.

With perpendicular recording, though, they think they can eventually hit somewhere around 1 terabit (about 128 gigabytes) per square inch. Today, in 2010, they're maxing out at about 400 gigabits per square inch in stuff you can buy off the shelf. There are quite a few years left of regular hard drives getting larger, faster and cheaper before the technology runs its course, and that's not even counting the wilder hard drive research that's going on. Heat assisted magnetic recording uses localized heating of disc surfaces, for ultra-dense data writing. Bit pattern media could reduce the space needed for a bit on a hard drive's surface from 50 to 1 magnetic grains, by encoding the platter's substrate with molecular patterns.

Seagate's hazy prediction for what this actually means for hard drives: Upwards of 50 terabits (6.25 terabytes) per square inch, which companies be working towards, and making money from, for years. Hard drives aren't going anywhere—at least, not for now.

The Inevitable Rise of SSDs

So what about SSDs, or solid-state drives? They're by far the buzziest of the storage options, and we're constantly told that solid-state drives will replace hard drives, like, now. That's not quite right. Solid-state drives, which have no moving parts and store data with electrical charge rather than magnetism, are taking over—just, not everything.

The basics, from our last Giz Explains on the subject:

What's inside is a bunch of flash memory chips and a controller running the show. There are no moving parts, so an SSD doesn't need to start spinning, doesn't need to physically hunt data scattered across the drive and doesn't make a whirrrrr. The result is that it's crazy faster than a regular hard drive in nearly every way, so you have insanely quick boot times (an old video, but it stands), application launches, random writes and almost every other measure of drive performance (writing large files excepted).

So, they're fast. They don't catastrophically fail (though they do slowly degrade). They're perfect for laptops! And you probably want one.

But the future of SSDs is a fairly narrow one, at least for now: Consumer applications range from notebooks to desktops to NAS storage, but they're all just that: consumer solutions. While we're going to have to wait a few more years for Flash storage to reach a truly reasonable price point for our new gaming PCs and notebooks, the enterprise world—where data needs are rapidly outpacing ours, and the scale of storage is so much larger—will have to wait much longer.

The fastest area of growth for solid-state storage isn't even in HDD-like SSDs anyway—it's in portable devices, like smartphones (and soon, tablets). This storage is of a different nature, though: speed isn't terribly important in a mobile device, nor is capacity. People are going to be fine with their iPad's low-mid-range chips of flash storage, because they'll run apps, play movies and store magazines just fine. Meanwhile, Google will continue to buy hundreds of thousands of massive hard drives to keep up with demand, and the rest of us will gleefully shell out for the rapidly cheapening solid-state drives that will power our laptops. This will continue in parallel, for as far as the eye can see.

But what will the SSDs of the future be like? Research now is focused on eliminating their comparative weaknesses more than anything else. They'll become more buyable, I guess? Cheaper? Longer-lived? (Current flash storage of the more affordable multi-level cell variety can only be written to about 10,000 before failure.) Yes, all of that. General Manager of SanDisk's SSD group, Doron Myersdorf, from our SSD Giz Explains: "More granular algorithms with caching and prediction means there's less unnecessary erasing and writing." In simpler terms, companies are getting smarter about writing data to SSDs, with their limited lifespan in mind. And on the storage capacity/price issue:

There have been several walls in history of the [flash] industry—there was transition to MLC, then three bits per cell, then four—every time there is some physical wall, that physics doesn't allow you to pass, there is always a new shift of paradigm as to how we make the next step on the performance curve.

SSDs as we know them today are still a young, and they've got a long way to go. And before the technology can completely take over the consumer space, we're going to see more and more awkward hybrid products, like Samsung's MH80 drive, which uses a small bank of flash memory for some tasks, and spins up the hard drive only when necessary. Progress!

Your next computer probably won't have one. But the one after that? Sure. Meanwhile, cheap flash storage, like the stuff inside your crappy USB key, will only get cheaper. And when 64GB thumb drives are commonplace and cheap, you'll probably stop caring about optical media, like Blu-ray discs, for file storage and sharing. Or not.

Our Holographic Future

Optical media isn't going anywhere, either. Put another way, Blu-ray isn't going to be the last disc you buy—it's just the last one where data will be stored only on the surface. Holographic storage, like GE is working on, and which we got to see up close at their Global Research labs, stores data down inside in many, many layers (GE's demoed up to 75), encoding the data using thousands and thousands of tiny holograms throughout the entire disc. The secret sauce is the material the disc is made out of, and how it reacts to light. On a broader level, where GE's holographic storage differs from the other major approach to holographic storage (called page-based), and what allows it to reach densities of 1TB per disc, is that it uses even tinier micro holograms that store less data per individual hologram, but more in aggregate.

While GE is mostly pitching the tech to archivists for now—like our friends at the Library of Congress, who wanna hold onto stuff for a real long time—since the discs, GE says, last for 30 years, what makes it viable as a storage tech you might get your hands on soon after it launches in 2012 is that it's designed to fit in with the current optical media infrastructure, meaning it'll be cheaper and easier to roll out than some radically different tech. That is, the discs are the same physical size and shape as CDs and DVDs, and they use a laser that's very similar to Blu-ray's, even using the same wavelength. On a hardware level, it just uses a slightly different optical element, but the rest basically comes down to software/firmware, meaning you might still be able to play your Blu-ray discs in a holographic storage drive. (This exploded view of a disc being read, that orange spinning thing, is what all readers look like in a laboratory, even Blu-ray drives—because it's easier to tweak settings than in their actual product form.)

Sci-Fi

After SSDs and hard drives are reduced to hilarious relics, mentioned only to shock classrooms full of children to attention with a jolt of pure absurdity ("so you're saying the spun? In circles?), how will we store data? A few of the nuttier possibilities:

• Carbon Nanoballs:

Interest is growing in the use of metallofullerenes - carbon "cages" with embedded metallic compounds - as materials for miniature data storage devices. Researchers at Empa have discovered that metallofullerenes are capable of forming ordered supramolecular structures with different orientations. By specifically manipulating these orientations it might be possible to store and subsequently read out information.

Two of pop-science's favorite buzz words, united.

• Molecular memory:

What if, instead of carving transistors and other microelectronic devices out of chunks of silicon, you used organic molecules? Even large molecules are only a few nanometers in size; an integrated circuit using molecules could contain trillions of electronic devices-making possible tiny supercomputers or memories with a million times the storage density of today's semiconductor chips.

A thumb drive larger than your entire NAS would actually have to be made arbitrarily larger, just so you wouldn't lose it.

• Bacteria:

Trust your data with tiny bugs: Artificial DNA with encoded information can be added to the genome of common bacteria, thus preserving the data....

According to researchers, up to 100 bits of data can be attached to each organism. Scientists successfully encoded and attached the phrase "e=mc2 1905" to the DNA of bacillus subtilis, a common soil bacteria.

Your storage drive could literally be alive, one day.

• Quantum mechanics: Data encoded on an unfathomable scale:

In a quantum computer, a single bit of information is encoded into a property of a quantum mechanical system-the spin of an electron, for example. In most arrangements that rely on Nitrogen atoms in diamond to store data, reading the information also resets the qubit, which means there is only one opportunity to measure the state of the qubit.

Granted, research into this now is focused on storing tiny amounts of data for a matter of seconds, which is just long enough to allow a quantum computer to barely function, but still: potential!

Data: It's everywhere. And one day, we'll be able to take advantage of that.

[Bacteria pic via]

Still something you wanna know? Send questions about platters, disks, bits, bops, beeps or boops here, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.

Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever.

This is the story of my trip to that vault—The Memory Lane, as Lego appropriately calls it—back in June 2008:

Visiting the Lego's Memory Lane—the secret vault guarding almost every Lego set ever manufactured—touched me in a way I didn't expect. This wasn't amazement or simple awe. I was already astonished to no end by the tour of the Lego factory. No, this was something else, something bigger than the impressive view of the 4,720 Lego sets inside this lair. These weren't just simple boxes full of bricks. These were tickets to ride a time portal to emotions and simpler days long forgotten.

I didn't know that when I was curiously ogling the oldest sets, from the 1950s. Jette Orduna-the curator for the Idea House, Lego's history museum set in the old family house of the owner, Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen-was explaining the first Lego sets, obviously enjoying my enthusiasm. "Here's the wooden box that some shops around Denmark had, usually hairdressers or general stores" she would say while carefully opening it for me to see its contents, simple red and white bricks without tubes, some of them with windows on them, "they contained individual Lego bricks. Back then, parents bought them regularly to their children, so they could keep expanding their Lego system." Then she would turn her attention to another set, as I kept asking what was this or that. "Yes, it's called 'electronic' because this train could be activated by whistling," she would explain, whistling herself.

I was just enjoying it like an archeologist. Her explanations, the cool box designs, the quick evolution of the first years... I was amazed by the ingenuity of it all, curious about the origins of the myth. But that was it. Just simple curiosity. Until we got to the 1970s.

Knowing my previous comments, Jette went straight to one of the shelves, at the end of the long aisle. She looked up and down, her lips pressed together, concentrated in finding something. While she was doing this I was filming around, eyes wide open, thinking "oh, is that?" and "nah, that can't be... can it?" my excitement growing by the second. It was then when she took out a large rectangular box with yellow sides, saying "a-ha! Here it is."

I turned around and I saw what she had in her hands: the Lego Space Galaxy Explorer.

And then it hit me. Lift off. Godspeed. Boom.

A wave of emotions took control, hitting my head like a Lego Airbus 380. Dozens of images started to appear in my head, Polaroids of Xmas and birthdays that I thought were faded, completely fresh, color-corrected, and restored by the damn Lucasfilm for a Blu-ray re-release. I could even see the Hollywood quote whores saying "Better than ever!", "The past never looked so good!", and "Five stars!" embossed in silver on the special edition boxed set. There was my mother and father-who built a huge Lego ferris wheel and the Blue Train for us when we were too young to build it, then never stop giving us new sets every year-and then my two brothers and my sister, playing on the rug, building all kind of new and wonderful constructions populated by the strangest creatures. And that smell. The perfect smell of Lego bricks.

You know what I'm talking about, those were the days and all that jazz. But for real. Feelings and moments from times when everything was innocent and your only concern was your bike, a big carpet full of Lego bricks, and the amount of cocoa in your cereals.

After that, it was one wave after the other, jumping from Lego Space to Lego Technic to Lego Town to Lego Castle and Lego Pirates and Lego Star Wars. Each set a memory, a particular Kodak moment blurred by the occasional teary eye.

Soon, too soon, it was over. And as I was walking up the stairs, back to the present, slowly letting the past fade back into the treasure chest, I thought: "This must be it. This must be reason why Lego is so loved by almost everyone in the planet." Sure they are fun. The details, the incredible designs, the way you physically touch them, how they make you use both your hands, creativity, and logic. All that is there, all are parts of their universal appeal.

But there's a lot more. Something more fundamental, bigger than the sum of all those qualities. Underneath all that there's a primal connection, something that makes everyone tune into the childhoods when they see the bricks, and get back into brighter, careless moments, even at the subconscious levels.

And thinking that, I joined Jette and Jan in the Real World, with a grin on my face.

I couldn't think of a better song to go with this story than the Johnny Cash version of Memories Are Made of This, from the album Unchained. Sadness and happiness at the same time, bringing so many other memories on its own. You can buy it at Amazon or the iTunes Music Store. In fact, get the whole album while you are it, because it's amazing (and so are the rest of the American Recordings series).

[Giz's Trip to Lego]

Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever.

Here's what he said:

"My system for storing digital files hasn't changed. Just more hard drives, and more dead ones. This is the most recorded era of human history, but I wonder how many of the records will survive."

I mirror my photos in 3 places: a backup hard drive, a Flickr Pro account, and MobileMe.

Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever.

I decided to check out three of my favorite things from my childhood: TMNT, Ducktales, and a Super Nintendo game called Bubsy. I haven't watched either of those shows or played that game in at least a decade, if not 15 years.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Memories: I loved this show. The turtles were total badasses but were also really cool. They fought really sweet enemies, like Krang, who was a brain in the stomach of a huge robot. They loved pizza, I loved pizza. It was perfect.

Realities: So these guys are basically just walking catchphrase machines, right? And how the hell do they never kill anybody when they're using swords and such? And I know this has been said before, but what would they do with April if they managed to land her? They very clearly don't have genitals. But really, this show is just ridiculous and nonsensical enough for me to not really mind it, as long as I keep myself in a gnarly early 90's state of mind.

Ducktales

Memories: I think Uncle Scrooge was in this, but not Donald Duck, right? And they solved mysteries? Which was the show with the rodent detectives, like that fat mechanic and the hot mouse? Was that a different show? All I know is that I loved this show and it had a really catchy theme song.

Reality: Oh yeah, Scrooge lives in that huge bank vault and swims around in money! What an asshole. And I totally forgot about this Launchpad character, who is a real buffoon. But you know what, this show is stupid but entertaining. Still stands up! Especially the theme song, which is as catchy and awesome as I remember it being. (Which I've got embedded up top.) Although man, Huey, Duey and Luey sure are a bunch of little misogynists. Give the ladies a break, guys.

Bubsy

Memories: This was an SNES platformer, and you were a sassy...bobcat, I think? I remember there being springs, I think, that launched you into the air. I have no idea who the bad guys were. But I played the silly out of both Bubsy and Bubsy II.

Reality: Man, is this game bad. I had no idea what was going on. There's no story or anything, not even a couple of lines up top giving you your motivation. And there's really nothing Bubsy can do other than jump, which he doesn't do very well. The controls aren't very responsive, which is made even worse when trying to play using a keyboard via an emulator. He's trying to collect orbs, I guess? And I didn't remember the bad guys because they're completely random. Oh, and did I mention the frog-launching minigame that was absolutely confusing and didn't tell me what to do at all? Fuck you, Bubsy.

So what did I learn from this little exercise? Well, for one, kids have really questionable taste no matter what era you're growing up in. So don't talk shit about iCarly if you grew up loving Rugrats. And sometimes maybe it's better to just rely on your fond memories rather than playing that piece of shit Bubsy game.

Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever.

Are there similarities between computer memory and human memory?

Everybody remembers numbers and computers remember numbers. People remember procedures and computers certainly remember procedures. But the other thing that's still important is that your perception as a human is affected subtly by all this stuff that you can't quite articulate. You run your life according to all this stuff that's happened to you. All of your memories affect everything you do whereas with a computer, there's adaptive software and things, but it's more literal.

So one of the significant differences between computers and people is the subconscious?

Yes. This business of "Drink Coke," the thing they would do in movie theaters [in experiments back in the late 1950s]. On some level, that really works. Apparently it has to be an important image. The thing that gets the guys is, you show a naked woman for less than the time you can perceive it, so 1/16th of a second, or about 60 milliseconds. The next image a man is exposed to will be remembered better. If you're a hunter or if you're trying to make a decision when driving, you make that decision based on stuff that you can't quite perceive. So the quality of a computer memory is only as good as the instruments that are feeding it.

So what's special about how the human brain stores memory?

It's not how big your brain is. The significant thing is how well the brain is connected. Apparently there is redundancy in memory: You store the same memory in different parts of your brain for accessing at different speeds. That speed would depend on the frequency of use and the importance of the knowledge. If you have a memory, "A burner is hot; do not touch burner," you might store that in a few places to make sure you have it. It would be very strongly reinforced. Riding a bike is apparently very well fixed. But as the cerebellum degrades with age, so does the quality of those memories. The memories are there, but they're not as good.

You did an episode of your show covering addiction. What were the key brain issues there?

There are two really striking things. First, whether it's methamphetamines or alcohol or gambling where there's no chemical involved or drug involved at all, all the researchers are studying dopamine. Dopamine is this brain chemical that gets to your dopamine receptors and makes you happy. You start doing the addictive behavior to feel good and then your receptors get overloaded with dopamine, then you stop doing the addictive thing and some of the receptors have shut down and you don't have enough dopamine to feel good. So then you feel bad and go back to the addictive behavior to get more dopamine. The strange thing is that it works with what we think of as uppers and downers and whatever you call gambling—sidewaysers.

Are smartphones and Google going to take the place of our memory?

I don't think so. If you memorize the periodic table it will speed you up if you're a chemist, but by and large, the reason you have a periodic table is so that you can store that information outside of your body. That way it frees up some part of your brain to do something else, doesn't it? Intuitively you want some place [such as your phone] to store phone numbers, so you have that part of your brain to do other tasks.

So you're saying that even before the iPhone and Google and everything, we were offloading information?

That's what makes a human a human, if we store information outside our bodies. If you put a blaze on a trail, a stripe of paint or ax chop on a tree, it shows other humans where the trail is. It's storing information outside of your bodies. It's the hallmark of being a human. I mean, dogs and other animals mark trees—and I'm all for that—but it isn't quite the same.

So we're not going to get stupider as a result of using computers?

Boy, I don't think so. It's different skills. For example, I'm so old—here you might say, "How old are you?"

How old are you?

I am so old, I entered engineering school with a slide rule. And I left engineering school with a calculator. I can still use a slide rule but it's not a skill you especially need anymore. And you can go on and on about these kids today, they don't know where the decimal point is, back in my day... Fine! But you don't really need to learn the slide rule. It's a cool thing, but a calculator is much better.

And now they have an iPhone instead of a TI-whatever.

So the first calculator that almost everybody could afford and had was the SR-50, Texas Instruments SR-50. Do you know what the SR meant? "Slide rule." It was as good as a slide rule, an SR-50. It was that good. I always say when you see that old black-and-white footage of the rocket on the launch pad and it falls over and explodes, that's because people had slide rules. Not having the decimal point is a real drawback. You want the decimal point, take it from me.

In geographical terms, GPS has done that too, right? People don't have to remember anymore.

The US Navy has several people on every ship that can navigate by the stars. They don't fool with that. Have you ever heard of the electro-magnetic pulse? The US Navy is very sensitive to this failure mode where people explode enough weapons high in the atmosphere and a significant fraction of the satellites are disabled. What are you going to do? You're a ship at sea in a trackless ocean. Cadets from the Naval Academy know how to navigate by the stars.

It almost makes me think of the book Dune and the mentats, the human computers.

Speaking of human computers, there is a guy named Art Benjamin, he's a human calculator. He says it's a skill he learned as a kid. Now he's a math professor at Harvey Mudd. He can find the square root of a six digit number in a few seconds. Practice.

But is that skill less impressive to kids now because they have computers?

I don't know, I think it's pretty impressive. It might be more impressive because it might be that arithmetic is even further from a kid's everyday experience. I mean, how can you do it as fast as a machine? And I meet so many people who are intimidated by arithmetic.

Thanks to Bill, the one and only Science Guy, for a lively discussion that also touched on global warming, the irresponsible behavior of Glenn Beck, why the internet may prevent another Hitler and how good salmon are at smelling. As always, you can catch his pearls of wisdom—and learn more about his war against ignorance—on his website.

Brain sketch by Patrick J. Lynch, medical illustrator, used under Creative Commons license

Thanks to Don for his transcription services

Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever. Read more on human memory here.

Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever.

Recently, our babysitter was struck by a car just a few steps from our front door. Luckily, none of her injuries were life threatening. Her cell phone, however, was brutalized beyond recognition.

Before heading to the emergency room, I climbed into the back of the ambulance where I asked her if she wanted me to call her boyfriend. She said she did, but she didn't know his telephone number. It was lost along with her now obliterated cell phone, and she had never committed the number to memory.

I remember the phone number to the very first house I lived in, when I was 4, even though I haven't used it since I was in first grade. But I could not tell you my father's cellphone number, which has remained unchanged for at least 5 years. (Mark helpfully explains why this is.) [Tweetage Wasteland via Daring Fireball]

Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever.

It certainly sounds odd, but by using a device called RhinoChill to spray coolant up a patient's nose after cardiac arrest, emergency medical personnel can "safely induce hypothermia to slow brain cells' metabolism, preventing the buildup of toxic molecules that can cause lasting damage."

The system hasn't been approved by the FDA just yet, but initial tests are at least optimistic:

A study of 200 patients showed that those who received RhinoChill were 15 percent likelier to live, and those survivors were 15 percent likelier to avoid brain damage.

Let's hope that future results are just as positive and that RhinoChill sails through the FDA approval process. At least then there'll be a good kind of brain freeze. [Pop Sci and American Heart Association]

Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever.