Don’t Erase
So, I recently finished Dunbar’s “Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language”. Although I am not convinced about Nostratic, Dunbar gave more than enough material to convince me I was right about past/future tenses in Chinese and English. I think it is pretty obvious, and was probably common sense to people with access to Alexandria library.
I think it was Meister Eckert who once said “Only the hand that erases can write the true thing”. And Saint-Exupery said “Perfection is achieved, not when enough has been added, but when there is nothing more to remove”.
These philosophies of willful filing of gear teeth lead to a “snaggle-toothed thought machine” that “clicks and whirs with the imprecision of a cuckoo clock in hell.” (Vonnegut).
The proponents of ”document deletion^H^H^H retention policies” argue that e-mail takes up too much space. Let’s examine that claim.
Suppose that the average human can spew forth language at 200 words per minute, rarely listens, and spews language for 8 hours a day (speech, typing, or otherwise).
200 wpm
* 2 bytes
* 60 min
* 10 hours
* 365 days
* 80 years
/ 1024 bytes/kb
/ 1024 bytes/mb
/ 1024 bytes/gb
Every bit of language you emit over your entire lifetime would fit on less than 7GB of space. This is basically uncompressed. Add modest compression, some timestamping and geocoding, and your whole life still fits in less than 10GB. There is no excuse for EVER deleting anything that any human being ever says.
Imagine if linguists 1,000 years from today have access to a corpus containing every word spoken/written by every human for the previous millennium. Imagine how much easier it would be to track dialect migrations (ala Brothers Grimm), repetition of memes, and so on. Imagine if a person asking questions on Yahoo answers can have instant access to every answer given for the same question in the past 1,000 years, and the personal histories and outcomes of every one.
It would be a lot harder for Chomskyans to bluff and bluster and shout “IT IS ALL AN ACCIDENT; LANGUAGE MEANS NOTHING!”