zip

[John Foust]

At 06:17 PM 5/25/2005, Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
>I would imagine you'd agree that we are pretty smart and that the Quipu is
>pretty simple, yet we still have not successfully decoded their meaning.

Although I agree with KISS principles, I'm not buying the validity of 
the quipu as a good analogy in this situation.  I'm no expert on quipu.
Haven't read the books.  There seems to be a cottage industry in 
theories about them.  With 20th century computer data, though,
if some future soul is interested in it, an understanding of ASCII
and probably English will be assumed.  

The point about the quipu is that their language and their encoding 
has been lost, and there seems to be many theories that assume 
they were purposefully encrypting the data and making it subject 
to retrieval and encoding through specialized human interpreters 
because of their perceived need for security and confidentiality 
of the information.  Some seem to believe they're a mixture of 
mneumonic and numeric data.

Who's to say that the future scholar is human?  Isn't it more likely
that the future scholar will be a machine, a mutated Google 
hell-bent on spidering 20th century trivia?

- John