In an imagined WWIII, our governments try to discourage us from blogging and tweeting, while troops are encouraged to seed their MP3s. And I'm sort of longing for a Rosie the Riveter poster with the subtle Reddit alien badge.

Moore plans to sell the posters, with 25% of proceeds going to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

[Moore's Store via Flickr via William Gibson]

Jerome McDonough, an assistant professor of library and information science at the University of Illinois, notes that our society has amassed over 369 exabytes of data, which includes art, business transactions, and correspondence. McDonough fears that this reliance on digital storage will lead to a “digital dark age” in which all this data is destroyed or rendered unreadable. While the physical records of previous eras are susceptible to destruction and decay, our digital media are far more vulnerable:

Contrary to popular belief, electronic data has proven to be much more ephemeral than books, journals or pieces of plastic art. After all, when was the last time you opened a WordPerfect file or tried to read an 8-inch floppy disk?

"Even over the course of 10 years, you can have a rapid enough evolution in the ways people store digital information and the programs they use to access it that file formats can fall out of date," McDonough said.

Magnetic tape, which stores most of the world's computer backups, can degrade within a decade. According to the National Archives Web site by the mid-1970s, only two machines could read the data from the 1960 U.S. Census: One was in Japan, the other in the Smithsonian Institution. Some of the data collected from NASA's 1976 Viking landing on Mars is unreadable and lost forever.

McDonough and other digital archivists are working to find ways to preserve our cultural legacy, but there are challenges. Proprietary platforms, for example, protect intellectual property, but create a greater risk that the media will be unreadable to future generations. It may be time to consider a discipline in digital archeology to develop tools to ensure the future readability of media across all platforms.

'Digital dark age' may doom some data [Physorg via Futurismic]

The beauty part of the chart below is that if you go to C-SPAN's website it lays out each debate like this, and you can easily mouse through it and click through quickly to videos and transcripts backing up the chart's claims. I'm telling you, this is pure information crack.

Keywords in the Debate and Timeline [via Information Aesthetics]

Tufte says:

Rocket Science is ~32 feet (10 meters) high and ~72 feet (22 meters) long, and is constructed from ~48,000 pounds (22,000 kilograms) of rusting scrap steel . . . The RS symmetry about a central axis combined with the crew headquarters in a capsule at the top is likely the best design for space vehicles (Apollo, and the new post-Shuttle generation of space vehicles carrying humans—Constellation, Ares, Orion). Such symmetry is contrary to the design of the current Shuttle (with its pretend airplane) that has contributed to its chronic difficulties. Better also to place the crew at the top end of the rocket, in front of the launch debris-shower in an unromantic capsule (no landings by astronaut commanders) as is the case for Apollo and the forthcoming Orion/Ares. Thus, RS has the symmetric architecture for the vehicles of the future but RS is crudely assembled, amateur rocket science.