Our secrets are everywhere in the cloud, shuffled from one server farm to another, replicated piece by piece in a thousand places, ready to come together on a microsecond’s notice, ready to shame us with remembrance – despite our desperate forgetting. [Click ‘Random Post’ above – be astonished] … [Read more...]
“Harold Changes His Mind” / Memorable Fancies #1510
31 March, 2016 by Leave a Comment
Harold changed his mind. It was old and he was tired of it, though he thought it still ran pretty well, for a mind that had been around for so many years, clogged with the silt of so many memories, his childhood and lovers and friends. The ads for newer minds sounded attractive, although with his old mind, Harold couldn’t quite understand what the ads were saying about nano and pico and femto and how buying one was such a great investment. Wouldn’t it be nice to understand all this new … [Read more...]
“Forgetting the Forgettery” / Memorable Fancies #761
3 July, 2014 by Leave a Comment
Sallie went to the Forgettery. She told the them that she wanted to forget all the times she’d shamed herself in front of her friends and lovers. “Fine,” the clinician said, “we can do that.” Then Sallie had second thoughts. “Look,” she said, “those people will still have their own memories of what I did. They will look at me oddly, head-atilt, and say ‘Don’t you remember the time that you...?’ or worse, they will look at me and say nothing. Probably the latter, and I will … [Read more...]
“Our Machines Forget” / A Memorable Fancy #214
26 January, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Our machines have been forgetting. At first a few crashes, but we quickly restored from backups while we still remembered how to do it. Then severe dropouts, parity errors, corrupted backups. It was difficult to know what the machines had forgotten, since the records of what they had known had also disappeared, or become a random assortment of 1’s and 0’s. And we – what did we want the machines to do for us, when we invented them? … [Read more...]
Memorable Fancies 