Being away from the text for 10+ days let me look at it “clean” (more or less) and I needed to remind myself of details, so I spent most of the day’s work yesterday reading and editing the first 200 pages. That lopped over into today, as well. This isn’t anything like a final edit, but it is “sweeping and dusting ” (relative to the use of chainsaw and machete which accompanies structural editing.) Added some ideas to the Ideas file, as well, and did more thinking about Grace Lane Vatta’s checkered past and what other buried stresses might lie beneath the appearance of comfortable, successful family businesses (not just Vatta’s.) Also, though we hope tech gets better and better in every way, my experience is that we trade convenience and speed for durability and the longevity of data storage…starting with the move from carved stone through baked clay and on up to the many varieties of electronic data storage which–if you don’t have the resources to buy the newest latest form and the time (or staff) to transfer files–means your data aren’t permanent at all. So what is the average time that memory in a brain implant would be durable? Hmmm. Requires some thinking on. And how does brain injury or degradation of mental function by something like Alzheimer’s interact with a brain implant? Also hmmmm.
Your Ladyship should not forget cloud storage and other offsite backups. Upgrades to the offsite hardware to the Newest Thing happen without customer intervention and if the data is well encrypted then the people doing the storage and transfers don’t know what secrets they carry.
You will, of course, have read Lois McMaster Bujold’s MEMORY, which deals with similar issues (in this case, it is the memory chip going bad, and the person functions really quite well without it)….
And haven’t they overcome Alzheimer’s by then? Even in our time they are beginning to understand some of the causes – it seems rather more complex than just one thing – so maybe….
Annabel: Oh, yes. MEMORY was brilliant, as are the ideas behind most of Bujold’s books. She did an excellent job with what happens when a prothesis you might not have really needed becomes your standard for that (movement/thought process) and how it can take considerable time to retrain the body/brain interface to use the original equipment (c.f. also Oliver Sacks in A Leg to Stand On, and multiple accounts of trying to get humans and other animals to use a repaired body part normally. I mentioned Alzheimer’s as something familiar to us now…some form of brain injury/degeneration will surely still be around, even if it’s different. The human brain is inherently vulnerable to many kinds of insults (you might want to read Ed Yong’s I Contain Multitudes about our microbiomes and their interactions with neurology.)
Iphinome: I do not use cloud storage and offsite backups because I distrust all encryption formulae…mass aggregations of data are like all those gold bars in the Brinks warehouse in London or a large cache of some critter’s favorite food…the predators sniff out such things and get at them. They will draw hackers whose inventiveness has, repeatedly, exceeded the cryptographic ability of those who want the data protected. That some of the data are personal and “useless” will not stop some people from deliberately messing with them, from sheer spite if nothing else. (Yes, I have my cynical side.)
Don’t get me started on cell phones and their DOS level operating systems–all of them.