Data Limits
On Christmas morning I “found” a new dictionary in my stocking. I realized several months ago that I’ve never owned a proper dictionary. Some speciality ones, foreign language ones, and more than a couple of styles guides, but never a real, proper dictionary.
I’ve had the Oxford Dictionary of English on my Kindle since college and I’ve had a laptop with Google since then too, but I’m growing increasingly skeptical of all these online things, how long they’ll keep and how reliable they’ll be now that all this software has to be profitable and there’s not money to pay for things. What words get deleted when we aren’t looking? What kind of ads will show up when we search for words, what will the Google Ad Spend look like and what kind of profitability will be assigned to each definition? What large-language-model hallucinations will replace the things we used to agree on?
So far my favorite thing to do with my dictionary is look up words with my daughter, who loves to ask “what does blank mean?” (She also loves to ask why are we and why are we here, so her existential dread is on target for development by ten years old, I’d wager, if I was a betting kind of woman.)
We look them up together, pulling the tome from it’s shelf. I show her how to find the first letter, trailing a fingertip along the scalloped recesses of each one and then we spell it out, flipping to the right page. I read her the entry and point at the synonyms. We try to find new sentences to use it in.
I can imagine, already, how this will go when she is older. She’ll ask what something means and I will tell her to look it up in the dictionary. She will roll her eyes and ask me why I can’t just look it up on Nano Banana or TikTok or whatever new hellscape they have devised for us. I will unplug the Wifi router, I will dismantle it and throw it into a lake or else a volcano. I will ground her for eternity.
But for now she is amused by this new book, the novelty. She likes to do things together. I like it too. And I like the big book with it’s stately presence and it’s thin, packed pages. I like the concision of the definitions and the different lists that they’ll have depending on the word, it’s synonyms and special usages.
Mostly though, I like that I am teaching her a kind of magic. A lost knowledge. Not a forbidden art, but one that is becoming rarer.
There was, during the time I was involved in computer sciences, a panic developing. There was a new generation coming into computer science classrooms who had no concept of file structure, of how to create, store, find, or access files based on these structures. With all the advances in personal computers and laptops, it had become easier and easier to use a computer without this knowledge. Search functions had improved, the Mac OS’s Finder helped obfuscate the structures that existed.
File structure, file hierarchy, has been one of these places of deep thought and intense debate in computer sciences, in software and hardware development and deployment. There are schools of thought, entrenched camps, powerful voices, but when it came time to start training the next generation of computer scientist at the university level… there was not awareness for the young people of any such problem.
It’s hard to explain the concern, but, put simply, there are limitations to what a computer can process and understand and when you’re working on software and especially systems level there is a big difference between files store inside folder ⇒ folder ⇒ folder and those stored inside folder. (This is a simplified example, don’t @ me, I know what a root is.) A file with the same information stored in different places is not the same file, but two separate objects in the computer’s memory and this has big ramifications if you’re updating one file thinking it’s the other or that it will also update the other.
There was a belief amongst Gen Z that it didn’t matter and that they’d always be able to search and find what they were looking for.
I’ve looked just now and would you like to guess how many files on my computer are “init” (required for running python, standard in other computer languages) or some simple variation thereof? 3856.
This same problem goes back though and I’m not immune to it. I didn’t have a dictionary, remember?
But also, I remember in college being both astonished and intimidated by the library’s vast resources… and only using sources I found online, almost always eschewing the practice of identifying and then finding and looking up the physical media that might have been available to me.
Are we losing something when we forget—or never know—how to structure and identify our data? Will my daughter be one of the few Gen Alpha who knows how to look things up alphabetically? Does it matter, or am I, already, an old woman shaking her fist at the sky asking for things to be how they used to be? Even if it didn’t use to be that way for me.
I’m in another search right now, still looking for answers. Seven weeks after my operation, I am still not “back to normal”.
Even more obfuscated than file structures, my body remains a loud mystery. An obvious secret. Present yet perniciously hidden. Here it is with all it
s feelings and nerves, fluids and viscera, its pains and complaints and limitations.
I cannot stop thinking about it and I know nothing of its needs and wants at this time.
For once it is not me waging war on my body, but the other way around. I have found that medical science is more limited than I’d imagined. It has taken two ER visits, a surgery, four visits with the surgeon, and countless hours trying to Dr. Google myself.
I didn’t realize, with my anti-authoritarian streak, that I still held on to the belief that doctors would be able to tell me, precisely, what was happening when I needed them too. That they could tell me what I needed to do. I didn’t realize I’d be so disappointed when they couldn’t.
Like I thought there might be a book that they had. A map. A library. Something mere mortals didn’t have access to that organized, categorized, color-coded all the messy things inside of us and what could go wrong.
That I could give them my symptoms and they could run their finger along my recessed edges and find an answer.
