Japanese Earthquakes

What do technology and geology have in common besides being ways to observe the history of the world in moments of massive and often violent upheaval?

Well, both have to do with stuff that future generations will find buried in the ground. Another thing they have in common is Japan.

Japan is in an area of high siezmic activity caused by the subduction of tectonic plates that smash together softly or violently to various effect through tremors and earthquakes felt on the surface above.

Japan has also been at the epicenter of technological earthquakes ever since consumer electronics became a retail category. One such earthquake was when rewritable CDs (CD-RW) came along in 1997 with over 600 times more storage space than the average floppy disk. That's like being able to take only 100 mL shampoo containers in your carry-on (middle finger to the TSA) only to have Obama return for a third term and then being able to take an imperial of Pantene (or two double magnums or eight wine bottles) onboard - hello democracy!

Much like the shifting of tectonic plates that are swimming in seas of jelly rock 700 km below the very spot you (yes you!) are standing on at this very moment, technology shifts in the same way and floppy disks were all but washed away in the resulting tsunami after CD-RW, USB sticks and then cloud storage crashed onto the scene.

So what's this all have to do with the movement from one storage medium to the next? Well, for those of you worried about Google and Apple knowing everything about your life,read on.

First, don't panic. We're miles in the future and miles away from Japan and its peace-fingers flashing earthquakes.

Second, there's now an entire generation of humans who consider anything from the 90s to be ancient history and so they're more at risk of having their lives taken over by Skynet.

The point is that while those sweet naive fools are running for their lives as Terminator drones pick them off, you can enjoy life in your foil-lined bunker, playing Doom and cruising chat rooms on IRC with the simple and comforting knowledge that you have your entire life securely spread over a bunch of offline spinners in a shoebox under your cot.

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