There is beauty in simplicity.
I think it's amazing how we throw around data. I've got a huge bittorrent download going (17GB) and it was originally downloading at 3KB/s. I thought, "man, that's slow." But then I thought about how much data is 3000 bytes. It's not a huge amount of data, but for a human to give that much data to another human would take a lot longer than a second. And that's what we consider slow. And so far I've downloaded 3.0 gig. 3 is a small number. We just forget how big a gig is. 3 billion bytes is just a portion of my download. 3 billion seconds is 95 years, an entire lifetime. I was complaining last week because it took me 10 minutes to burn 700 million pieces of information to a small plastic disc.
Every so often I contemplate the fact that we can take a blu-ray disc, burn 50GB of data on to it, send it around the world, and retrieve all that data. We took 50 billion pieces of information, put them on a small piece of plastic in the palm of our hand, subjected it to shock waves, bumps, trucks, planes, automobiles, and every single piece of information is still available to us.
Do you know how big 50 billion is? 50 billion seconds is 15 hundred years.
And the amazing thing about sending 50GB around the world? It's an every day event. Not even special. Do it all the time. Ten bucks on ebay.
I love the universe. I love technology.
Every so often I contemplate the fact that we can take a blu-ray disc, burn 50GB of data on to it, send it around the world, and retrieve all that data. We took 50 billion pieces of information, put them on a small piece of plastic in the palm of our hand, subjected it to shock waves, bumps, trucks, planes, automobiles, and every single piece of information is still available to us.
Do you know how big 50 billion is? 50 billion seconds is 15 hundred years.
And the amazing thing about sending 50GB around the world? It's an every day event. Not even special. Do it all the time. Ten bucks on ebay.
I love the universe. I love technology.