Recording Your Entire Life

Scientific American has an article on Gordon Bell's 9-year-long experiment of recording great swaths of his life on digital media. The idea harks back to an article by Vannevar Bush in the 1940s, which arguably presaged hypertext and the Web as well. Bell, the father of the VAX computer and now with Microsoft Research, first published a paper on his experiment in CACM in 2001. The goal is to record "all of Bell's communications with other people and machines, as well as the images he sees, the sounds he hears and the Web sites he visits." Storage requirements are estimated at a modest 18 GB a year, 1.1 TB over a 60-year span. Not a lot if the article's projection comes to pass — that we will all be walking around with 1 TB of storage in our portable devices by 2015. The article is co-authored by Jim Gemmell, who wrote the software for the MyLifeBits project.

only 18 GB ?

[L. VeGas]

Either he's asleep 23 hours a day or he spends every waking moment staring into space.

18GB/year

[brainspank]

pfft. I think I could top that on a weekend. Or maybe he just uses URLs.

- 2007.02.16:20.31.19.GMT
movie://holy-grail-dircut/chapters/3
food://cheetos
observe://fingers/wrongcolor/orange
use://pants/wipe.cgi

or maybe he just sits in a dark room. a stream of 0's would compress pretty well.

immortality

[Anonymous Coward]

Immortality in 3 easy steps (patent pending):
1. Record all sensory information available to your brain from conception.
2. Grow a genetically identical clone of yourself.
3. Boot your clone from disk. If anything goes wonky, revert to a clean install.

Use appropriate DRM to prevent unlicensed copying.

Re:Instant messenger chat logs

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly if people had read the chats they would think so differently of me considering the things I discussed,

Man I didn't know necro2607 was that into his wizard robe and hat.

kinda repetitive

[garlicbready]

i think the real question is who's going to bother watching it?
perhaps in the future you could record your entire life, watiching someone else's life, who's been watching someone else's life on a mac

hmmm
I wonder how many Gb would be taken up just taking a piss
and how well it would compress with x264 over a period of several years

Cool! Will I be able...

[Mr.Scamp]

Will I be able to use google on the collected data to find my car keys in the morning? If so, sign me up now.

Re:Only 18Gb...

[slackmaster2000]

Just upgraded to MS Office 2007 eh?

Re:Note to self:

[HeadlessNotAHorseman]

God only records with a crummy black and white CCD. It would be useless but for the fact that he has a copy of the same software used in CSI et al to zoom in to infinite levels or see around objects.

Wait a minute...

[K-Man]

That's my life, slowed down .975%.