Sunday, February 08, 2004
Research Day:
What gets bigger, a human or a pumpkin? Answer: Human.
Can you still buy a chastity belt?
After the story about the woman who set off airport metal detectors with her chastity belt, I wondered where you would get such an item. Answer: eBay of course. Both antiques and fancy modern ones for BDSM types.
It has recently been claimed that all human speech could be stored on a 5 exabyte disk (thats 5 billion gigs). I wanted to find out if there are any arrays of disk storage that big.
Google has 3,307,998,701 pages cached by its googlebots. It certainly sounds like a big hard disk. Wolfram suggests there are just 15000 google computers. For reasons of economics those each probably have at least 250 gig hard disks. That's only 3.75 million gigs, short by a factor of about 1300.
Apple have just sold their two millionth iPod. With an average capacity of 20 gigs, that's 40 million gigs stored on the world's iPods. So iPodders, (even if they could all be connected) still could only store 1/120th of all human speech ever.
What if all the SETI@HOME nerds stopped looking for Mork and ALF, and concentrated on storing data? SETI@HOME has 4871961 home computers all connected via the net. Assuming an average 80 gig hard disk (not unreasonable for newish PCs), that's only 0.38 exabytes of storage. Stupid good for nothing nerds. (91% before you ask)
If all those big numbers have given you brain ache, relax with the story of a Nazi dog: "Lawyers were unsure whether ordering a dog to give the Nazi salute was a criminal offence."
What gets bigger, a human or a pumpkin? Answer: Human.
Can you still buy a chastity belt?
After the story about the woman who set off airport metal detectors with her chastity belt, I wondered where you would get such an item. Answer: eBay of course. Both antiques and fancy modern ones for BDSM types.
It has recently been claimed that all human speech could be stored on a 5 exabyte disk (thats 5 billion gigs). I wanted to find out if there are any arrays of disk storage that big.
Google has 3,307,998,701 pages cached by its googlebots. It certainly sounds like a big hard disk. Wolfram suggests there are just 15000 google computers. For reasons of economics those each probably have at least 250 gig hard disks. That's only 3.75 million gigs, short by a factor of about 1300.
Apple have just sold their two millionth iPod. With an average capacity of 20 gigs, that's 40 million gigs stored on the world's iPods. So iPodders, (even if they could all be connected) still could only store 1/120th of all human speech ever.
What if all the SETI@HOME nerds stopped looking for Mork and ALF, and concentrated on storing data? SETI@HOME has 4871961 home computers all connected via the net. Assuming an average 80 gig hard disk (not unreasonable for newish PCs), that's only 0.38 exabytes of storage. Stupid good for nothing nerds. (91% before you ask)
If all those big numbers have given you brain ache, relax with the story of a Nazi dog: "Lawyers were unsure whether ordering a dog to give the Nazi salute was a criminal offence."
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