5 ms·
Yeah, that's silly. 34 gb is 34 billion bytes, so if each byte is a character and the average word about 5 characters, 34 gb should be more like 6.8 billion wor
by majos 8y ago
Yeah, that's silly. 34 gb is 34 billion bytes, so if each byte is a character and the average word about 5 characters, 34 gb should be more like 6.8 billion words.
Also, most of that 34 gb is probably video anyway, in which case we may as well say the ancients consumed many gb of information per day in the form of looking at the world around them.
- mapcars 8y agoYou are mistaking words for information. This message has few dozens words but much more information :)
- habitue 8y agoOh, no way. The information conveyed through human language is an abysmal drip compared to the actual number of letters used to spell it out. Even without knowing anything semantic, compression algorithms can squeeze text down to much fewer bits. And both of our minds together have a shared dictionary of concepts and thoughts gzip doesn't have access to. The actual number of bits conveyed is rather low.
- brainwad 8y agoEnglish contains around one or two bits of information per character, so actually they are basically correct. See http://www-isl.stanford.edu/~cover/papers/transIT/0413cove.pdf http://www-isl.stanford.edu/~cover/papers/transIT/0413cove.p... and http://www.anthology.aclweb.org/J/J92/J92-1002.pdf http://www.anthology.aclweb.org/J/J92/J92-1002.pdf.
- Johnny555 8y agoThat number could be made arbitrarily high... an hour of 720p TV is 1280 * 720 * 3 * 60 * 3600 is 238GB Granted my eye averages/summarized the pixels and my brain ignored a lot of the content (i.e. I don't notice the clock ticking in the corner while the hero is fighting the bad guy), yet still an argument could be made that that's the amount of data I'm exposed to while watching an hour HD movie through my HD display.