The Earthquake
The Earthquake
I am twenty-six and I’m flying up in the air.
It’s black and louder than anything I’ve ever heard. I’m in my BEDROOM and Lesley and I are about four feet over the bed, midair and heading down. This would be more entertaining at Six Flags, but lucky us, the earth itself has decided that the entire LA basin is now 100% bouncy houses. It’s a 6.7 Richter earthquake. Hundreds of times more powerful than your average 5er that winkles the sheets.
The screams are different than your bouncy house. True terror from every direction as we are on the top floor. It stops. Starts again. Gets much worse. Stops. Goes again. The aftershocks come one after another and the world stops bouncing and we’re ice skating and gliding left/right/left. Stop. Left.
People leave their apartments and never return, but I’ll be going to work in a couple days.
I am twenty-six and I’m staring at a large green pile.
Steeeeve and I are in front of a new art exhibit that was installed in our shared space by a huge earthquake. It’s green, spiky, twisted and made of thousands of green floppy disks. All the drawers seem accounted for but are either on, buried or swimming across the sea of information.
We’d been called a day or so after the quake stopped, and both of us suspected what might be waiting for us. Thousands of floppies, and our media director wanted it fixed as soon as possible, because the madhouse is always open.
We’re both thinking hard, I think. I was staring and trying to decide how we might approach this. My friend is thinking too. Hard.
Nothing comes. There’s no way to “rake” or “scoop.” Magnets would be fun to try but the effects wouldn’t be as funny to the data. The reality is sinking in. We will have to do this, effectively, one disk carefully at a time.
Donald Rumsfeld is here and he’s suggesting we try to put things into four buckets: known knowns, known unknowns, unknown unknowns, and a difficult to understand unknown knowns group which hurts to think about. We’ll have to sort all the disks into each category. My friend is confused and I help him understand Donald:
- Known knowns: things we think we fully understand.
My friend is light and I continue: There are disks here that have been transformed into something new. Beautiful new shapes…
…Steeeeve picks up a disk that has been transformed into a taco, and I’m not working on that yet.
…I’m saying exactly, a taco is beautiful and new, but isn’t a great way to save data. So, we know about this and we can act.
…Throw away? my friend helps.
Again, exactly, I’m replying, and you can keep any you enjoy for home.
And we can immediately identify potentially hundreds of new and exotic shapes these disks are now in. Many tacos as this is a single fold or so. Some are more pointed and this is all lovely and we’re getting those out. Only thousands and thousands more to consider and this is the fast part.
The next part of known knowns, the known non-participants. These are disks that have decided not to be transformed and they know who they are. Why? The contents are on labels on the disk.
That gets us down to thousands and thousands of disks to review. Sure, plenty of work, but we’ve made some progress.
We move to Donald’s second category, known unknowns. My friend is puzzled and is asking how you can know nothing. I’m thinking about pre-Socratics and Parmenides, but decide that, although this is an excellent teaching moment, we have to start making progress.
The known unknowns are the remainder and these fall into a few categories:
There are known disks that are unknown to still work. About half are in this shape. We both need to take each disk and examine. We think and decide the fate of each. Do I believe this disk will work or not? Am I certain? If I doubt, I must test on a computer and try to see if most or all of the files are still good. This will slow things down; therefore, we decide to call the best half “good enough” and we will wait until their eventual failure, and then there’s the other half that are important enough that we test. One at a time. I wish I had learned that pop-shick technique after all, suddenly, but we’re doing it. Hour after hour after hour…
…this is so boring, let’s go.