this post was submitted on 07 May 2024
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Science Memes

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submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 40 points 6 months ago (1 children)

QR code for the DOI would be better IMO

[–] [email protected] 20 points 6 months ago (5 children)

Might be obsolete after a bit though. A QR code only points to a URL and that might change (unlikely, but after 20 years...)

[–] [email protected] 32 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

QR codes can contain just about anything, including the URI (doi:foobar) form that the tattoo uses. QR codes themselves will probably go the way of USB: In a million years there's going to be someone looking at the driver code saying "you sure we can't get rid of those early versions" just for someone to chime in saying "your keyboard still uses USB1".

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago (1 children)

A QR Code encodes a string of text. In can be a URL, or anything else. Like the DOI string above, a quote, or whatever. You can't do full Unicode I think, it's 8859-1, or something like that, although there's also an Asian variant.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (2 children)

But your camera phone can already copy text. If it's a tattoo about the first paper you wrote, whatever you make needs to work for 60+ years. Text is always going to be valid, who knows when QR codes will become obsolete. 60 years ago you'd be getting a tattoo of a punch card, and that would be mostly meaningless today.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

My camera phone can’t copy text :(

(Original iPhone SE, so not recent, but not ancient or a flip phone or anything)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

I was just addressing the fact that QR Codes were only for URLs. As for whether they'll be around in 60 years... Barcodes have proved to be fairly resilient.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 6 months ago (2 children)

A QR code can also just contain plain text. It's just usually used for URLs.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Wonder what an appropriate error correction level would be for QR tattoo

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Probably loads less then you would need for signage. I reckon you could get away with no redundancy if you went with a large enough base size on the grid.

You can go as far as replacing the square “pixels” with circular dots and it still reads fine, qr codes are kind of amazing.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Awesome!

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Plain text can also encode plain text. Why are we complicating this?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

because a qr code containing the ~15k characters of the paper would be a full back piece of tiny dots. Probably unreadable anyways.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

Because you can't read the article by reading it's number, and there isn't enough room for the whole article on normally visible parts of the body (not to mention the cost of that tattoo).

The QR code would give you a way to copy/paste the id so you can actually give and, you know, read the thing.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago

DOIs are forever. It's why they exist.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago (2 children)

You can make QR codes that copy text to a clipboard right? Can't you just make it a DOI search term? Or pay $2/yr for a redirect domain that you can point to where you want later

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Sure, but that $2/yr company goes out of business after 10 years and the QR code stops working.

I guess making the number just copy into your clipboard would be a decent option, but you can also just copy/paste text from images now, so why go through the trouble of QR coding it when that only makes sense to a computer?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago

Even if your registrar goes out of business ICANN will help you restore the domain with a new registrar.

Source it happened to one of my customers.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

A numerical .xyz domain costs less than a dollar a year, and you can make as many redirect links as you want.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It costs less than a dollar for the first year. After that, who knows.

The plain text is much more reliable than any url.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

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This is from the registrar itself back in 2017.