Digital vs Analogue

Cameras are magic, right? How is it that they can produce an image of what it is that I'm ogling? Sure - you can tell me the science: I just finished reading the Apothecary's House, so I have some vague sense of the photographic process as it relates to chemicals.

Digital cameras are mystical. The image is transformed - transmographied - into data. What is data? When I'm reasearching, data is the information that I write or type. Typing it on the computer complicates this idea, since the formation of the letters and sentences is again data-fied into some ethereal, mathematical, cosmic goo.

The goo is put somewhere, and when I want to examine it in a form that my little brain can understand, it has to be translated. The translation process I can grasp a bit better - the cosmic goo is put through the Universal Translator a la Star Trek (original series). POOF! I see pictures and words. I hear music. Wow.

What could possibly go wrong?

I guess I don't know, but something does go wrong somewhere. The digital camera informs me, while I'm using it to gather data for my work, that I'm done for... Actually, what it says is, "Clean card with a soft cloth." I understand this: the Universal Translator is not about to translate. Whatever cosmic goo I have stored up is not going to be vulgarized into anything I can wrap by mind around.

So, I poke at the buttons. I change the batteries. I clean and polish and blow out all the dust. You know already this doesn't help. I know it, too, but I have to do something.

I turn to the internet, to find out where I've erred and how I can get back on the Universe's good side. Error: poking at the buttons in the first place. Getting the Universe to return to me the images I stored: dunno.

This calls for someone less enamoured of the digital camera than I am; an unbeliever with a firm grasp on cosmic goo.

Rob pokes at the buttons, but systematically.

"Data? Are you in there?"

He thinks he hears something, so Rob sets off to find an add-on for the Universal Translator. Will the add-on translate? Will I see pictures? Stay tuned for next week's show.