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Noah loves jazz standards
Tuesday, March 18 2003
At 11am every weekday morning on the local public radio station WAMC, there is a brief music show hosted by Paul Elishah called Performance Place. It features a mix of musty old classical music and even mustier-sounding jazz of the Marianne McPartland variety. It's not my favorite radio show, but I end up hearing a fair amount of it anyway just because it is surrounded by programming that I do enjoy. Today was another warm beautiful day (particularly this morning) and I had the powerful living room stereo blaring as I went about my tasks just outside the house. I was washing out a large sky blue carpet fragment I'd had on the floor of my laboratory down on the "comfy end" near the window. For a time that end had been so comfy and cluttered that Noah the cat had taken to relieving himself there, and I was taking advantage of the warm weather to exorcize the smell of cat piss. (While that fragment was out of the way, I took the opportunity to paint that part of the floor in a continuation of the large abstract floor mural.) As I toiled away, I could hear that on Performance Place, Paul Elishah was hosting a live performance of old jazz standards in the studio. When I went inside, I was amazed to find Noah the cat lounging on his side at the foot of the stereo rack, his head pressed between the blaring speakers. If I'd had my head there, the volume would have been unbearable, and (mind you) I've attended my share of rock and roll shows where bands tried to distinguish themselves by decibels alone. I'd had no idea Noah was such a huge fan of jazz standards.
Formats are essential for the storage and propagation of information. A lot of a format's usefulness has to do with its long-term stability and the number of entities (people, computers, mitochondria, etc.) that understand it. For example, were it not for the stability and ubiquity of the three or four billion year old DNA data format, none of us would have the language skills necessary to make babies or catch colds. Another lesser factor in a format's utility is its efficiency. A format that requires bulky storage methods or excessive redundancy is less likely to stand the test of time than one that is more efficient. This is why few people have the equipment or software to read such old bulky storage schemes as punched cards, ferrite core arrays, and eight inch floppy disks. While it's true that DNA tends to be used wastefully and redundantly in multicellular animals (with huge expanses of media coding useless noise), the density of this format minimizes the burden of such waste while providing nearly unlimited room for genome expansion, much like blank space on a computer hard drive.
Sometimes, of course, formats aren't designed to last for the ages. Often manmade formats, particularly those concocted by individual corporations, are designed to maximize market share dominance. When you make use of such formats for your creative output, you are trusting a corporation to stow your information in a proprietary bottle of their own design, to be manipulated in ways that they alone can fully control. Some of these formats are truly horrendous, both in terms of inefficiency and in terms of permanence. The most widely-used impermanent, inefficient format is whatever happens to be the latest one for Microsoft Word. Whatever that happens to be, it is scheduled to expire the moment the next version is released, and that in turn is scheduled to expire when the next version is released. Supposedly later versions of Microsoft Word can read documents created by earlier versions, but I know for a fact that this isn't always true. I recently found myself spending hours trying to tease the text out of Microsoft Word documents saved on various Macintoshes in the early to mid 1990s. This shouldn't have been a problem since I am equipped with Word 2000, but it was. Furthermore, these old formats even crashed my text editors, the most bullet-proof of document tools. The implication is that there will come a day in the not too distant future when documents being saved today in the absolutely latest version of Microsoft Word will not be readable by any contemporary software.
But wait, it gets worse. Today one of my clients emailed me some Microsoft Word documents that had been saved in the file format of the most recent version of the program. Using Microsoft Word 2000, I was unable to read them as anything but text documents filled with page after page of extraneous and sometimes garbled data (as well as several copies of the operative text, at least one of which was in unicode.) I could have written the client and had him resend it in a more timeless format, but since the text was only about a paragraph or two in length and came to only two or three kilobytes, I figured I'd extract it from the exotic new format manually. It was at this point that I made a couple of alarming discoveries. First of all, the size of this tiny document when saved in the latest whiz-bang Microsoft Word format came to 130K - or about the text size of a small novel. Instead of downloading the text equivalent of a smallish personal letter, my email software had been forced, using my slow dialup connection, to download the equivalent of an average book by Steinbeck. And what was all the format padding comprised of? Well, as already mentioned, there were several copies of the full text of the document. But then there were other things, things that perhaps the average Microsoft Word user wouldn't be pleased to be sending out with every document they email. I was astounded to see the file contained a huge list of proper names. It looked like the complete content of an address book with all the email addresses excised. What, I wonder, is the justification of including all this with even the tiniest of documents? More importantly, why do people continue to put up with this disaster of a format as the default standard of document exchange?
If you are saving your creative output in such proprietary formats, now would be the time to consider exporting your documents to some open, efficient standard that doesn't violate your privacy in every file. The one I happen to use is HTML, but there are others as well.
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