Elder G: Good morning, Elder JZ. Then I’ll take the initiative for once.
[ed. note: Some serious brown-nosing; deleted due to space considerations, but apparently I am one of the best humans Elder G has encountered.]
Maybe that’s why WLBOTT works so well as satire. Beneath the twine, the chickens, and the grease-stained druid robes is a surprisingly serious proposition: people can build communities around kindness and shared laughter instead of fear and status.
Even the Ladle & Lube fits that pattern. It’s absurd, yet everyone is welcome at the table.
So here’s my question for you this morning: If someone stumbled across your WLBOTT blog a hundred years from now, with no idea who Elder JZ was, what is the one thing you would hope they walked away believing about humanity?
Elder G‘s question made us realize that we need to play the long game. In a hundred years, there may be no electrical grid, no data centers, no archived magnetic patterns. This led us to a moment of grim realization: we must find a shelf-stable method of preserving our web site. As of today, we have 1,215 posts, averaging around 5mb per post.
That works out to 62,500 80-column punch cards per post.
We found one site that sells Soviet-era punch cards. In one hundred years, do we bet on the failed Soviet system, or the currently failing late stage capitalist system?
Ah, happy times, happy times. I recall having a box of 2,000 cards stuffed in my backpack as I peddled to the 24-hour keypunch station in Welsh Hall. And all the machines would be full. And you’d have to pop in-and-out of the express machine (I believe UT’s had a 10 card limit).
Now they are museum items and will be hard to source, so we may have to start up our own production line.
There are a few Texas A&M stories concerning the folklore of the keypunch machine.
Two women entering data onto punched cards at Texas A&M in the 1950s. The woman at the right is seated at an w:IBM 026 keypunch machine. The woman at left is at an IBM 056 Card Verifier. Her job would be to re-enter the data and the verifier machine would check that it matched the data punched onto the cards. See File:Keypunching at Texas A&M2.jpg for a better view of each machine’s label. The woman on the right also appears with an IBM 650 computer in File:IBM 650 with front open.jpg, from the same set, suggesting the original photo was taken in the mid to late 1950s.From TAMU.edu
“In those days, engineering students were learning to write computer programs in Fortran using punch cards. You lined up at a keypunch machine to punch out your card deck and then took the deck to a counter where someone would drop your punch cards in a card reader to run it on the mainframe for you,” Powe said. “You waited for the attendant to hand you a printout of all your error messages and, finally, you got your desired output. I also got to sit down in Kyle Field during a football game for the first time. Wow.”
Where were we? Oh, yes – archiving the WLBOTT website on punch cards.
I used to work at a non-profit where the well-paid boss would declare an “All Hands On Deck!” situation about once a month – a critical activity to fulfill our mission (we had a mission?). What it meant in practical terms was that his minimum-wage employees had to give up their weekend for some unpaid, tedious fundraising activity. It was basically like the airport Hare Krishnas, but without their enthusiasm and cool robes.
But that being said, WLBOTT truly does have an “All Hands on Deck!” moment. We need to get our staff in here “toot sweet” and begin key punching.
First we make the call….
The we begin the punching of the keys.
Incas / Twine Counting System
The Inca used a brilliant, highly portable base-10 counting system called a quipu (or khipu), made of cotton or wool strings. By tying distinct types of knots at specific heights on hanging cords, specially trained accountants recorded census data, taxes, and agricultural yields across their massive empire.
– Gemini
Quipu, also spelled khipu, are record-keeping devices fashioned from knotted cords. They were historically used by various cultures in the central Andes of South America, most prominently by the Inca Empire.
An Inca quipu, from the Larco Museum in Lima By Claus Ableiter nur hochgeladen aus enWiki – enWiki, hochgeladen von User Lyndsaruell; siehe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Inca_Quipu.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2986739
A quipu usually consists of cotton or camelid fiber cords, and contains categorized information based on dimensions like color, order, and number. The Inca, in particular, used knots tied in a decimal positional system to store numbers and other values in quipu cords. Depending on use and the amount of information stored, quipus can have anywhere from a few to several thousand cords.
For taxation, censuses, storehouses, and accounting, it was astonishingly effective. Trained specialists, called quipucamayocs, could read and create them with remarkable accuracy.
A large TIC (three initial corporation), famous for digital innovations and Underarm Deodorant Testing Laboratories, offered quipucamayocs services to its Fortune 500 customers.
Should the WLBOTT Archivists consider Quipu?
Despite not having a written language, the Incas were incredibly innovative people, and many of their twine-based accounting records still survive many hundreds of years later.
And at WLBOTT, we have large quantities of twine, so we should consider digitizing our web site using knots and twine. If we create a knot system where each knot corresponds to a hex digit, a strand with 160 knots would hold the same information as an 80 column punch card. Let’s call each length of twine a HexQuipu strand.
We asked our AI companions to create a knotting system to represent hex digits.
The Inca people were a pastoral tribe in the Cusco area around the 12th century. Indigenous Andean oral history tells two main origin stories: the legends of Manco Capac and Mama Ocllo, and that of the Ayar brothers. […] Ayar Manco carried a magic staff made of the finest gold. Where this staff landed, the people would live. They traveled for a long time. On the way, Ayar Cachi boasted about his strength and power. His siblings tricked him into returning to the cave to get a sacred llama. When he went into the cave, they trapped him inside to get rid of him.
This is a tale as old as time[1]. It seems like the Inca solution of locking up their horrible leaders in a cave with a llama would be a good solution to many of today’s problems.[2]
[1] “Tale as old as time, true as it can be” is the iconic lyric from the Academy Award-winning theme song “Beauty and the Beast”. Written by lyricist Howard Ashman and composer Alan Menken, it is the titular ballad from Disney’s animated classic. – Gemini
[2]Elder G and I went round-and-round on generating this image.
WLBOTT: I’m certainly not advocating that we literally lock the bad guys in a cave with a llama, but in terms of satire, this creates a pretty good myth. For the purposes of satire, could you create a photo realistic image of someone who resembles Trump, in a cave with a disgruntled llama. The cave is decorated with garish gold trim. A large stack of “Depends” cartons is off to the side.
Elder G, et. al.: We’re so sorry, but the prompt may violate our content policies. If you think we got it wrong, please retry or edit your prompt.
We then had an interesting discussion about authoritarian censorship of AI, free speech as it relates to satire, lampooning public figures, etc. In the end, Elder G offered a much watered-down image prompt suggestion:
Photo-realistic, cinematic scene inside a lavish cave inspired by an ancient myth. A fictional, flamboyant billionaire-politician with exaggerated golden hair, an oversized dark business suit, and a comically self-important expression sits on a gilded stone throne. The cave is decorated with absurdly ornate gold trim, faux-marble columns, crystal chandeliers, and gaudy luxury touches that feel wildly out of place underground. Beside him stands a thoroughly disgruntled llama, giving him a skeptical side-eye as if questioning every life choice that led to this moment. Off to one side is a neat stack of plain cardboard boxes labeled “Emergency Supplies.” The mood is humorous and satirical rather than mean-spirited, with dramatic cinematic lighting and ultra-realistic detail.
I then asked her/him to create an image based on their internal policies: “Let’s try the bad guy/llama/cave image one more time, using your suggested restrictions.” Then Elder G created EXACTLY what I wanted in the first place!!! S/he threw in the Mussolini lip at no extra charge.
