Anyone who can read German can read the first book ever printed. If you can read Sumerian cuneiform, you can read clay tablets that were probably the first things ever written. Hard copy sticks around, equally a delight to scholars and a burden to office managers. More significantly, the read-out system - the human eye, hand, and brain for which the scribes of Sumer scratched in clay - has not changed appreciably, which is why nearly every written thing that survives, from the dawn of writing to yesterday's newspaper, is still accessible and constitutes a fragment of civilization. But as we move forward we discover that not all modern means of storing data share the characteristic of eternal readability. This problem originally appeared in the pre-electronic age, with the invention of sound recording. Signals were embodied in an object that required a specific machine to render it back into a form that could be apprehended by the senses. In those days, there were dozens of incompatible recording formats. The 10-inch, 78-rpm shellac platter ultimately won out, but not before the losers had produced a substantial body of recorded material, some of it irreplaceable. Serious audiophiles constructed customized machines that could play anything from Edison cylinders to the various platter formats - including those that ran from the axis to the circumference - to the standard outside-in disk. When LPs were introduced, turntable manufacturers included variable-speed switches, so you could play your old 45s as well as the new "albums." That was a slower era, of course, when decades passed between one standard and another. But the advent of digital computing in the early '50s vastly accelerated the pace at which we replace formats designed to store information. With computers increasing an order of magnitude in speed every two or three years, at the same time decreasing in cost, the pressure to dump the old, less efficient standards was irresistible. Obviously, much of the data stored on the old systems - the material of immediate or archival value to the organization doing the replacement - is recorded in the new format and lives on. But a lot of it doesn't. Digital archaeology is a discipline that doesn't quite exist yet, but may develop to deal with this problem, which is pervasive in the world of data. NASA, for example, has huge quantities of information sent back from space missions in the 1960s stored on deteriorating magnetic tape, in formats designed for computers that were obsolete twenty years ago. NASA didn't have the funds to transfer the data before the machines became junk. The National Center for Atmospheric research has "thousands of terabits" of data on aging media that will probably never be updated because it would take a century to do it. The archival tapes of Doug Engelbart's Augment project - an important part of the history of computing - are decaying in a St. Louis warehouse. "The 'aging of the archives' issue isn't trivial," says desktop publisher Ari Davidow. "We're thinking of CD-ROM as a semi-permanent medium, but it isn't. We already have PageMaker files that are useless." Also, recall that the PC era is an eye-blink compared to the mainframe generations that came and went under the care of the old Egyptian priesthood of computer geeks. (Would you believe a '60s vintage GE 225 machine that ran tapes that stored 256 bits per inch? Drop some developer on it and you can actually see the bits.) J. Paul Holbrook, technical services manager for CICNet (one such Egyptian priest), summarizes the problem this way: "The biggest challenge posed by systems like this is the sheer volume of information saved - there's too much stuff, it isn't indexed when it's saved, so there's lots of stuff you could never discover without loading it up again - that is, if you could load it up. "The nature of the technology makes saving it all a daunting task. It's certainly possible to keep information moving forward indefinitely, if you keep upgrading it as you go along. But given the volume of data and how fast it's growing, this could present an enormous challenge." Holbrook says twenty years is the maximum time you can expect to maintain a form of digital data without converting it to a newer format. He draws an analogy to print: "What if all your books had only a twenty-year life span before you had to make copies of them?" A 'museum of information,' suggested by WELL info-maven Hank Roberts, might help to stem the leakage. Roberts says, "[Museum] collections are spotty and odd sometimes, because whenever people went out to look for anything, they brought back 'everything else interesting.' And that's the only way to do it, because it always costs too much to get info on demand - a library makes everything available and throws out old stuff; a museum has lots of stuff tucked away as a gift to the future."

Abbey Road is the 11th studio album released by the English rock band the Beatles. It is their last recorded album, although Let It Be was the last album released before the band's dissolution in 1970. Work on Abbey Road began in April 1969, and the album was released on 26 September 1969 in the United Kingdom, and 1 October 1969 in the United States. Abbey Road is widely regarded as one of the Beatles' most tightly constructed albums, although the band was barely operating as a functioning unit at the time.[1][2] Despite the tensions within the band, Abbey Road was released to near universal acclaim and is considered to be one of the greatest albums of all time.[3][4][5][6][7] In 2012, Abbey Road was voted 14th on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time".[8] In 2009, readers of the magazine also named Abbey Road the greatest Beatles album.[3][9]

01 Come Together (Take 1) 0:00 02 Something (Take 37) 3:39 03 Maxwells Silver Hammer (Early Mix) 6:37 04 Oh Darling (Early Version) 10:13 05 Octopuss Garden (Take 32) 13:39 01 I Want You (Shes So Heavy)(Mono) 16:27 02 Here Comes The Sun (Mono Mix) 24:11 03 Because (Take 16) 27:15 04 You Never Give Me Your Money 29:30 05 Sun King (Early Mix) 35:15 06 Mean Mister Mustard (Mono Mix) 37:15 07 Polythene Pam (Mono Mix) 38:58 08 She Came In Through The Bathroom 40:18 09 Golden Slumbers (Early Take) 42:11 10 Carry That Weight (Early Take) 43:47 11 The End (Take 3) 45:26 12 Her Majesty (Take 3) 47:26 13 Maxwells Silver Hammer (Take 5) 47:51 14 Octopus`s Garden (Take 2) 51:32 15 Come And Get It (Demo) 54:21 16 Ain't She Sweet (Jam) 56:49 17 Something (Demo) 58:54 18 Old Brown Shoe (Demo) 1:02:12 19 All Things Must Pass (Demo) 1:05:13 20 The End (Take 7) 1:08:16

Chris Morris is considered to be one of the greatest satirists ever and has been responsible for some of the most controversial, and let’s face it funny, programmes on television. In the UK, comedy writers and performers ranked him number 11 out of the 50 greatest comedy acts ever, above people including Bill Hicks, Peter Sellars and Eddie Izzard.

Apart from being a comedy great, he’s an incredibly interesting guy. He’s performed with Peter Cook, Stereolab used his sketches as lyrics on one of their albums, he won a BAFTA for his first short film and, for ‘Brass Eye’, he tricked a British politician into asking questions in Parliament about a made-up drug called ‘cake’ (which still remains in the public record).

Oh, and he’s also really into science.

Brian and Chris have been friends for several years now. When they get together, conversation tends to start on politics (Brian’s favoured topic of conversation) and move swiftly onto what’s being done at CERN (Chris’s favoured topic of

Podcast: December 11th 2009 / theme = best first tracks on albums [Audio clip: view full post to listen] Subscribe: via iTunes