Dig-it-all
Thursday, 5 November 2009
Several year ago I was fascinated by the story about a Dutch inventor ( Jan Sloot ) was said to have worked out a way to store massive amounts of digital data on a chip. He died without revealing his secret. I have already written about this, so i will keep it short here. In an interview he supposedly had said that his method was extremely simple. That made me think that I could work it out too.
For weeks I did little else than trying to figure out how this could be done. I was amazed how much I learned and discovered about this subject within such a short period of time. And the insights, that I got in data reduction, the relations between analogue and digital data, mathematics and other related subjects, were extraordinary and way beyond my expectations. Of course, I did not solve the problem, but I wrote my best guesses and insights down in two little booklets that I sent to a handful of people.
One of these people, Bert Kiekens, is a physicist, who helps me out whenever I have questions about physics. He has made himself a website on which he explains his take on physics. I don’t have the brains nor the knowledge to understand most of what he writes, although he did give me explanations in laymen’s terms on some of the most spectacular subjects. But to my surprise he put up the first booklet on my digitall-idea on his site (here ).
It made me smile when I re-read these ideas. I can hardly imagine that I wrote this myself. And it brings back many memories of things that I did not write down while I was submerged in these ideas. If I ever was on the brink of loosing my mind, it was during this period. And I can tell you that it was very tempting to let it go and loose it. If I didn’t have a family, I would probably have allowed to drift into insanity. There are regions in the mind where ideas grow like grass in a field. Even if most of these ideas are impossible to translate to words (very much like dreams), I feel it as extremely pleasurable to hang out in these parts of the mind. But every time I get there, and back then I was there longer than ever.
If you would like to, you can read the first booklet on Bert’s website. But for those who want to read all of it, I made scans of the second booklet:
And here is a doucumentary on Jan Sloot and his invention:
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