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.

He was featured in FastCompany ...

[everphilski]

He was the feature in Fast Company a few issues ago. It was a really good read.

here it is [fastcompany.com] although there are a lot of pictures and sidebars that are missing from the original print article.

Re:only 18 GB ?

[atamido]

or he spends every waking moment staring into space.

If he was looking up into space [slashdot.org], he'd be getting a heck of a lot more than 18GB. The human eye gets the equivalent of around 600 million pixels. [wikipedia.org]

The telescope will use a digital camera with 3 billion pixels to image the entire sky across three nights, producing an expected 30 terabytes of data per night.

Robert Shields

[solevita]

This sounds almost as detailed as Robert Shields' [soundportraits.org] diary, except he did all his work on a typewriter!

Over the past 20 years, he has typed between three and six-thousand words each day, keeping a record of everything that happens to him.

Re:You think they missed the mark?

[lindseyp]

--You don't suspect that in a few years we won't have terabyte storage on our personal devices, do you? That would be really short sighted. If we're still here in 7 or 8 years, 1TB will probably be pretty ho-hum.

-We have TB of HD space for what $700-$800? It's not quite there, yet.

It's not quite 2015 yet, either.

Back in 2000 a 128MB Trek thumbdrive was $399. $3.12 per megabyte.

OK hard drives are cheaper. here [littletechshoppe.com] is a nice historical table of the cost per gigabyte. For reference the number of Mb per $0.01c seems to go up by a factor of around 10 every 5 years. Meaning that 1 TB of storage should be around $70-80 in 5 years time.

And even then it won't be 2015 yet

Re:Is that Islam, or is that cartoons?

[amRadioHed]

I'm familiar with Bugs bunny and that's not what I'm talking about. My source is my Muslim coworker, it came up in conversation just last week. Regardless about two minutes of googling will reveal plenty of verifcation such as here [wikipedia.org], here [wikipedia.org], here [muttaqun.com], here [beliefnet.com], and here [muslim-canada.org].

The cartoon depiction of angels on our shoulders did come to my mind when we were discussing it. The popular notion is not the same as in Islam since they are influencing your actions, not recording them. However Islam has been around for a long time, it may well be the source of that cartoon cliche.