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"An exabyte is roughly 100,000 times the size of the printed material in the Library of Congress; a zettabyte is 1,000 times larger." How big is a Mega-Library

"An exabyte is roughly 100,000 times the size of the printed material in the Library of Congress; a zettabyte is 1,000 times larger." How big is a Mega-Library of Congress? Are people actually able to relate to that measure? (How about instead, say, "one exabyte would store about 5000 short emails for each member of the world's 7 billion population, perhaps more by using compression")

StavrosK 13y ago
Show me a million people or seven billion people. Will I be able to tell how many they are? I doubt it. These numbers are meaningless because we never see a million of something.
- unhammer 13y ago
  1 million people is meaningless. 7 billion people is everyone: yourself, your parents, your son/daughter, all your friends, your president, etc.
  - StavrosK 13y ago
    That doesn't change the fact that "all the people" means nothing to me as a concrete quantity.
- dTal 13y ago
  A million isn't that big or unimaginable. There are a million cubic centimeters in a cubic meter. As for people, here's a picture of Glastonbury festival: http://www.andrews-sykes.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/glastonbury.jpg http://www.andrews-sykes.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/06... That's about 100,000 people camped out. Picture 10 of those and you have your million. If everybody at the festival crowded shoulder-to-shoulder in front of pyramid stage, it would probably just about fill that field. So you can picture ten of those fields if you want to imagine a million people smooshed together.
  - StavrosK 13y ago
    It's not that it's unimaginable, it's that we lack the necessary mental resolution to perceive both the entire set and its elements individually. A million might be just small enough to do that, but the average person doesn't have am intuitive notion of the number "one million" like we have of ten or twenty. Even for a thousand, you'll have to think of a seventh of a cup of rice, or something like that.
    - dTal 13y ago
      That's interesting, I'd never thought of visualizing a thousand of something that way - I'd have thought using tiny indistinguishable units that cover each other up is admitting defeat from the get-go. I've always thought in terms of those little centimeter blocks they have to visualize powers of ten in grade school. A thousand is simply a 10x10x10cm cube (a cubic litre), quite easy to visualize. There are a also a thousand millimeters in a meter, and a thousand people is also a common order of magnitude for a group of people in a school context (population of the school, or a single year of students, or the number of people attending a sports game, depending on the size of the school).
- ToastyMallows 13y ago
  You should take a look at the Chrome extension "Dictionary of Numbers". It reads through text on a page and any time it sees a quantity, it replaces it with something equivalent that you might actually know. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dictionary-of-numbers/ahhgdmkmcgahbkcbmlkpmmamemlkajaf?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dictionary-of-numb...
  - StavrosK 13y ago
    Huh, that's very interesting, thanks!

StavrosK 13y ago

Show me a million people or seven billion people. Will I be able to tell how many they are? I doubt it. These numbers are meaningless because we never see a million of something.

unhammer 13y ago
1 million people is meaningless. 7 billion people is everyone: yourself, your parents, your son/daughter, all your friends, your president, etc.
- StavrosK 13y ago
  That doesn't change the fact that "all the people" means nothing to me as a concrete quantity.
dTal 13y ago
A million isn't that big or unimaginable. There are a million cubic centimeters in a cubic meter. As for people, here's a picture of Glastonbury festival: http://www.andrews-sykes.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/glastonbury.jpg http://www.andrews-sykes.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/06... That's about 100,000 people camped out. Picture 10 of those and you have your million. If everybody at the festival crowded shoulder-to-shoulder in front of pyramid stage, it would probably just about fill that field. So you can picture ten of those fields if you want to imagine a million people smooshed together.
- StavrosK 13y ago
  It's not that it's unimaginable, it's that we lack the necessary mental resolution to perceive both the entire set and its elements individually. A million might be just small enough to do that, but the average person doesn't have am intuitive notion of the number "one million" like we have of ten or twenty. Even for a thousand, you'll have to think of a seventh of a cup of rice, or something like that.
  - dTal 13y ago
    That's interesting, I'd never thought of visualizing a thousand of something that way - I'd have thought using tiny indistinguishable units that cover each other up is admitting defeat from the get-go. I've always thought in terms of those little centimeter blocks they have to visualize powers of ten in grade school. A thousand is simply a 10x10x10cm cube (a cubic litre), quite easy to visualize. There are a also a thousand millimeters in a meter, and a thousand people is also a common order of magnitude for a group of people in a school context (population of the school, or a single year of students, or the number of people attending a sports game, depending on the size of the school).
ToastyMallows 13y ago
You should take a look at the Chrome extension "Dictionary of Numbers". It reads through text on a page and any time it sees a quantity, it replaces it with something equivalent that you might actually know. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dictionary-of-numbers/ahhgdmkmcgahbkcbmlkpmmamemlkajaf?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dictionary-of-numb...
- StavrosK 13y ago
  Huh, that's very interesting, thanks!