Correct the stream, or complete wipe?
"Corrupt" ~ Austin, Texas © 2011 Skip HuntLast night our digital HDTV service went all haywire and started freezing the screen in various stages of corruption.
As I watched each iteration of the system trying to correct itself, I became fascinated with the temporary abstract compositions I was witnessing.
They would only stay and quiver for a few seconds then morph into something else altogether. Before the problem was finally resolved, I made a quick image of one of the frozen digital aberrations and tweaked it a bit to taste.
As I studied the broken information, I began to wonder about our own system and how somewhere along the line the built-in autocorrection stopped functioning.
Did the insidious breakdown happen just within a very few people who managed to claw their way to the very top and allow their corruption to ultimately taint the whole system? Or, is the whole system broken in such a way that creates these aberrations at the top?
If we could backtrack downstream from the top I bet we could find the locations in the stream where it forked and went woefully awry. What I wonder is if it could actually ever be corrected completely. This is assuming of course that some malignant mutation within the system itself is what got us where we are today. If so, we could likely get to work cleansing and guiding the corrupt data back into a stream and perhaps that would eventually self-purify throughout.
Unless of course the malady exists first at the top and the head has spoiled the entire stream downwardly. In that case, I suppose it would make more sense to go to work on correction from the top. With the head of the fish cleansed by capitation and replacement, perhaps that would correct the impurity in the rest of the body. If the system is the problem though, it would merely be a matter of time until the new head rotted as well.
Another possibility is that whatever caused the corruption at the head ubiquitously caused the corruption of the body too, and the aberrations are now metastasizing in a state of pure chaos. If that's the case, the correction will likely need to come from either some outside divine source, or the system will have to recognize it's whole inherrant divine power to correct itself all at once.
Back to the original pondering of the digital HDTV data stream errors ... I wonder if it is even possible to correct every aberration in a system no matter how much the corruption has chaotically spread? At some point must you completely wipe the system and start over from scratch? I would imagine that unless you isolate where exactly the system went off course in the first place, you will be destined to be fighting the same aberrations over and over again no matter how many times you wipe the system.
Skiip Hunt
Austin, Texas
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