Day: December 2, 2009

301Works.Org

301Works.Org is an initiative started by the Internet Archive to preserve shortened URLs. Thanks to Twitter (and email and other uses to a lesser extent) URL shorteners are widely used to reduce long URLs to much shorter versions using any number of shortening services.

But what happens when one of those URL shorteners shut down? Suddenly, all of those links stop working? 301Works.Org is trying to cover that base by archiving the URL mappings of shortening services — so it knows that what long URL a shortened URL points to and other can use for reference if the URL shortener ever shuts down. In addition, if any service that is part of 301Works.Org every shuts down, they may end up having 301Works.Org take over handling redirects,

Participating companies will provide regular backups of their URL mappings to the 301Works.org service.  In the event of the closure of a participating organization, technical control of the shortening service domain will be transferred to 301Works.org in order to continue redirecting existing shortened URLs to their intended destinations.

That’s probably just good business sense. Companies joining in this can advertise that even if they should have to shut down at some point, the URLs their users shorten will go on working.

Brian Martin’s ‘Information Liberation’

Not sure where I ran across this anymore, but Brian Martin has posted the full text of his 1998 book Information Liberation online in both HTML and PDF format. This is hardcore information wants to be free stuff — what originally caught my attention was chapter 3, Against Intellectual Property, which argues for the abolition of intellectual property.

Gompertz Law of Human Mortality

Gravity and Levity has a concise, informative summary of the Gompertz half of the Gompertz-Makeham Law of Mortality.

In the early part of the 19th century, mathematician Benjamin Gompertz proposed that mortality rates increased exponentially over time. Specifically, any individual’s odds of dying double every 8 years. As Gravity and Levity summarizes it,

For me, a 25-year-old American, the probability of dying during the next year is a fairly miniscule 0.03% — about 1 in 3,000.  When I’m 33 it will be about 1 in 1,500, when I’m 42 it will be about 1 in 750, and so on.  By the time I reach age 100 (and I do plan on it) the probability of living to 101 will only be about 50%.  This is seriously fast growth — my mortality rate is increasing exponentially with age.

And if my mortality rate (the probability of dying during the next year, or during the next second, however you want to phrase it) is rising exponentially, that means that the probability of me surviving to a particular age is falling super-exponentially.

Why would this be the case? There is a longer explanation at Gravity and Levity, but the short version is that the human body simply wasn’t engineered by evolution to survive all that long. Accumulated injuries, disease and other things that impact health eventually exhaust the body’s ability to overcome the damage.

On the one hand, this is a bit depressing to see our odds of surviving decreasing super-exponentially. On the other hand, it means there is something that could potentially be done about it if better technologies are developed to repair or avoid the damage that the body itself cannot repair (for example, a medical advance that all but eliminated breast or colon cancer).