QR Codes For Memorials

mikejuk writes "Companies in America, Denmark and the UK are adding QR codes to gravestones that can be used to view online memorials via smartphones. The idea is that these living headstones can include photographs, videos and memories of the dead person from family and friends. Genealogists and historians have always found graveyards a useful resource. If the QR idea takes hold memorials will be able to tell much more to future generations."

Re:QR codes != information

[Sarten-X]

Wrong [wikipedia.org]. QR codes can store over 2KB of arbitrary binary data.

Re:Companies don't live forever.

[Anonymous Coward]

The point of headstones isn't to have information available for a few months or years, it's to have information available for centuries . The internet hasn't been around for very long compared to the headstones being used by Genealogists and historians, and there's no guarantee that it won't change completely in the next 20 years in such a way as to be unrecognizable. Carving a URL in stone for future historians a hundred years from now is as pointless as having the phone company list your address as "I'm currently standing in front of the checkout at the grocery store" in the phone book.
For the record, here is a list of things that can go wrong with your plan of using private hosting and having a trust handle the hosting costs:

1. Internet addressing method changes completely in 20+ years, and memorial site is no longer accessible because nobody uses http://.../ [...] for anything, and there aren't any servers running that protocol anymore.
2. Civilization collapses and internet infrastructure is gone, leaving your QR code pointless even if people are able to figure out how to decipher it when civilization eventually recovers.
3. Provider experiences catastrophic systems failure, all sites hosted (including your memorial) are lost.
4. Trust runs out of money due to bad investments or rapidly increasing costs, and provider shuts down site due to lack of payment.
5. QR codes fall out of popularity, as something else becomes popular instead (which then also falls out of popularity, and is replaced by yet another thing), scanning software becomes unavailable, and people wonder why grave markers from 100 years ago all have that weird staticy-looking square on them. Historians hypothesize that it was some kind of tribal identification symbol. Also, they regret that there's no actual useful information about the people buried there.

Like the GP said, you can include the bio in the QR code. Again though, this seems pointless when you can use the same space to just carve the bio in human readable characters if you want it included at all. If you're totally opposed to normal people being able to read it just by looking at the stone with their eyes, have it done in Klingon or something.

Re:Companies don't live forever.

[pnot]

QR codes can store more data than just a website address. In addition to a URL, name, dates, and a brief biography are reasonable things to include in a large QR code.

But at that point you may as well write the brief biography in English, and save your descendants from having to figure out how to read a QR code.

If our forebears had done this a hundred years ago, great-great-grandad's brief biography would be encoded on a bronze punch-card in an encoding nobody can find the documentation for. Text, on the other hand, has been working just fine for millenia.