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109 points colinprince | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.195s | source
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akkartik ◴[] No.44506571[source]
The 'but why?' link is fascinating: https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/not-fade-away-preventive-...
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vasco ◴[] No.44506653[source]
> This means that if these prints are displayed for three months at 50 lux, they should be stored in the dark for at least a year before they are displayed again

> While these measures will not stop fading from occurring altogether, they will ensure that these world-famous prints fade so slowly that they will be seen by countless generations of visitors to the Museum in the future.

This trade-off is interesting, are we maximizing for number of people watching works? Or are we purely maximizing time? Because its not obvious to me that more people will see a work if it lasts 1000 more years but spends 80% of that time in storage, vs lasting 100 more years spending 0% of the time in storage.

Also lets say you go to the museum today and are lucky that it happens to be on display. But your friend travels to see it, it happens to be in 80% storage time, then the friend goes back home and dies without seeing it so that some future person that doesn't exist yet even can see it later without fading. Why is the future person more important than the current person, in a sense?

Storing it assumes a lot, that humanity will survive, that people will be interested in seeing it, that some fire isn't going to destroy their storage, etc. Meanwhile real life people would've seen it already. I don't have an answer, just questions though.

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qq66 ◴[] No.44506766[source]
By limiting the hours today, it helps make sure that the people who do see it are the ones most interested in seeing it. Those are the ones who will look up the schedule, schedule their trip around it, etc... while if it's just permanently up, many of the viewers will be random passersby (and the number of viewers per hour of illumination will probably be lower)
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1. vasco ◴[] No.44506816[source]
Ok that is adding an interesting variable of perceived interest and then it's not about # of people anymore, but rather time plus # of _interested_ people. I guess that has to be the reasoning because it does make sense if that's the optimization goal.

Though I'd imagine mostly its going to be a random sample of people that happen to be there that day. I imagine there's likely under 1% of museum visitors actually chasing single works and planning trips like that. So most people that would see it are still just random "museum people" (which under the "interest" metric is still better than purely random people).