experience design, emerging media, business and technology [circa 2014…]
Proving that satire is one of humanity’s fundamental instincts, Packetrat strikes a blow for (wood)fiber-based communications networks with paperblogging, or plogging.
Outstanding.
Related posts:
How Much Information? 2003 is an update to a project first undertaken by researchers at the School of Information Management and Systems at UC Berkeley in 2000. Their intent was to study information storage and flows across print, film, magnetic, and optical media.
It’s not surprising that the United States produces more information than any other single country, but it was eye-opening to read that about 40% of the new stored information in the world every year cones from the U.S.
Also surprising is the total amount of instant message traffic in 2002, estimated at 274 terabytes, and the fact that email is now the second largest information flow, behind the telephone.
Some excerpts from the executive summary:
“Print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of new information in 2002. Ninety-two percent of the new information was stored on magnetic media, mostly in hard disks.”
“How big is five exabytes? If digitized with full formatting, the seventeen million books in the Library of Congress contain about 136 terabytes of information; five exabytes of information is equivalent in size to the information contained in 37,000 new libraries the size of the Library of Congress book collections.”
“Hard disks store most new information. Ninety-two percent of new information is stored on magnetic media, primarily hard disks. Film represents 7% of the total, paper 0.01%, and optical media 0.002%.”
“The United States produces about 40% of the world’s new stored information, including 33% of the world’s new printed information, 30% of the world’s new film titles, 40% of the world’s information stored on optical media, and about 50% of the information stored on magnetic media.”
“How much new information per person? According to the Population Reference Bureau, the world population is 6.3 billion, thus almost 800 MB of recorded information is produced per person each year. It would take about 30 feet of books to store the equivalent of 800 MB of information on paper.”
“Most radio and TV broadcast content is not new information. About 70 million hours (3,500 terabytes) of the 320 million hours of radio broadcasting is original programming. TV worldwide produces about 31 million hours of original programming (70,000 terabytes) out of 123 million total hours of broadcasting.”
Related posts:
It’s been awhile since I’ve had time to read the Word of the Day emails that I get from the good people at Merriam Webster and Yourdictionary.com: long enough that I’ve set up a filter directing their daily contributions to the betterment of my vocabulary into a one of those dead-end Outlook folders that you see highlighted in bold, but never manage to do anything other than bulk delete every few months when you recognize the number of unread messages has crossed from two to three digits. (The count of unread words of the day in my folder is now 91 – just about time to purge again.)
But now, thanks to the atrocious epidemic of spam that’s raging without surcease, I don’t need to feel bad about ignoring the latest juicy word to drop into my Inbox.
Now instead of knowing that it will only be shunted aside and ignored for months before its’ summary termination, I can calmly watch as it’s disposed of without ado.
Now all I need to do for a rich and unusual lexical lesson is peruse the subject lines of the dozens of spam messages that the layers of filters deployed by my ISP haven’t corralled as parasitic trash.
Thanks to the pertinacious conclave of spammers who’ve found the means to pollute the Internet with offers of discount medicines and penile enlargement disguised behind word combinations generated by dictionaries and scripts, there’s a veritable smorgasbord of uncanny solecisms gracing my inbox every day.
Things like, “libidinous plutarchy”, “inconspicuous megohm”, “charcoal expectorant”, and others not even worth mentiong despite their remarkable incongruity bring me unforeseen verbal richness.
Aside from the surrealists and their experiments with automatic writing during the 30’s, who but a spammer would ever think to send out a message about “albania seethe pfennig columbia” – which by the way would make a great name for comic book villainness “You haven’t won yet, Albania Seethe! Justice will be done!”
My day is already good when I can look forward to reading about “erosible integument”, which I seem to remember overhearing the last time I was within fifty yards of a geochemistry lab.
“Systemic cohomolgy” sounds like a pretty cool degenerative disease, or maybe a death metal band.
“Afghanistan surname baboon” is the sort of thing I’d expect to hear coming from one of those early artificial intelligence programs trying to recreate human speech: the sort that you used to see on Nova in the early 80’s; you know the scene – lots of twenty-something guys who haven’t been out in the sunlight enough even though they’re at UC San Jose are all standing around a radio-shacked amateur version of a speaker cabinet looking intently at an amber monitor, while one of them types “Hello. How are you today?” on a keyboard without a cover, only to end up visibly crestfallen when a tinny synthesized voice spits out something akin to gibberish above, and in the end they utter the inevitable combination of exuberant pronouncements regarding natural language processing, and conditioned realism about the fallacies of science fiction expectations.
Some of the spammers no doubt prefer to take a more Zen minimalist approach to fomenting palaver, using single words that bespeak a substantial degree of amphiboly; “gasify”, “archfool”, “deciduous”, “involute” and “burg” are examples of this tradition.
Then there are the imperatives, not to be casually ignored without some measure of trepidation: “deconvolve”, “rebut”, “throb”, and “migrate” for example.
With all these SAT words flowing uninterruptedly into my mailbox, there’s practically no excuse for not doing the Times crossword in pen.
So I say “Thank You Spammers!” Spam On! Whenever I want a tasty linguistic morsel, I’ll just shut off my spam filters…
Related posts: