Wednesday, October 29, 2003

Human bandwidth

Since this is my first blog, I'd like to use this space to really bemoan the fact that now that blogging has become so popular, the singal to noise ratio is really in the toilet. Actually, that's not even the problem. The problem is that there are tons of people out there and I'm sure they all think that they have something important to say, and it's quite likely that they do. But no human could possibly read or enjoy all the things that all the people out there in the world have to say. It's just not possible.

I had a great picture up on my wall for a while from Jim Gray's Turing award speech... 

Human input data          /hr        /lifetime

READ (text)               100 KB      25 GB

Hear (speech @ 10 KBps)   40 MB       10 TB

See (TV @ .5 MB/s)        2 GB         8 PB
It's so fascinating to think that we're physically bounded by the our input bandwidth. Regardless of comprehension. You actually can't beat it, without some kind of neural input. Suffice it to say, that the total bandwidth, comprehension included, of people reading blogs is just way way below that. That's a nice bound for how many people I think are going to read this :)

Updated [11/10/2004]: Oh just trying to correct a spelling error that's more than ONE YEAR OLD.

posted by Iron Yuppie 10/29/2003 11:34:00 AM

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