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First the man is gone, now his books have followed.

Thursday 15 February 2007 at 10:40 pm
Following the death of Terrence McKenna in the year 2000, the Esalen Institute took ownership of his voluminous library of rare texts and an uncatalogued number of his notes, diaries, and other pieces of written information that accumulated through the course of his life. On 5 February a five-alarm fire broke out in the building in Monterey that the library was kept in, destroying everything. An incredible amount of information was lost in the blaze that also consumed a couple of restaurants, a coffee shop, and several other office blocks. So many rare tomes, some dating back to the 1800's at the very least are now gone.

What a loss. What a horrible loss.

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six comments recorded.

Wow, that’s a great loss.

And people wonder why I always advocate soft copies and express my distrust of paper as a valid backup medium. Give me a file that’s been saved to a few different locations over a scrap of paper at the bottom of your purse anyday.

`Lex (URL) - 16 02 07 - 12:24 - Reply to comment?

I have to agree with you on the necessity for multiple forms of data backup and storage. Books are wonderful things to have, make no mistake, but they have their vulnerabilities. DVD-ROM disks and magtapes can be taken offsite and placed into cold storage.

One thing that you have to do, however, is trust whomever is holding your data remotely to back it up properly… and verify that the backups are usable.

What was it that Linus Torvalds said? “Backups? Real men upload their data to an FTP site and let the world mirror it.”

I’m a big proponent of copying things to external hard drives and stuffing them into a safe deposit box, personally. You can get 250GB drives for very little money (relatively speaking) these days.

The Doctor (URL) - 17 02 07 - 14:33 - Reply to comment?

looks oddly at the time/space traveller with a love of rare books and recently purchased shelf-space… You know, if I didn’t know better, I’d be forced to wonder if those particular books burned up after all… or were removed “in the nick of time”.

[Jarandhel] (URL) - 18 02 07 - 15:24 - Reply to comment?

<quiet smile>

Manifestations of information are temporal, and decay. The information itself remains, and can be preserved…

The Doctor (URL) - 20 02 07 - 09:42 - Reply to comment?

Agreed. After all, all information is ultimately derived from a combination of two sources: Nature and Intelligence. No knowledge can permanently be lost, as long as those two things exist; and without either of them nobody much would be around to care that it had been.

[Jarandhel] (URL) - 20 02 07 - 11:11 - Reply to comment?

An excellent point.

The problem with losing the manifestation of information of some kind is that it has to be rediscovered. This is possible given time, but the length of time required is usually practically prohibitive.

The Doctor (URL) - 20 02 07 - 13:40 - Reply to comment?


  
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