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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • When I was in highschool we toured the local EPA office. They had the most data I’ve ever seen accessible in person. Im going to guess how much.

    It was a dome with a robot arm that spun around and grabbed tapes. It was 2000 so I’m guessing 100gb per tape. But my memory on the shape of the tapes isn’t good.

    Looks like tapes were four inches tall. Let’s found up to six inches for housing and easier math. The dome was taller than me. Let’s go with 14 shelves.

    Let’s guess a six foot shelf diameter. So, like 20 feet circumference. Tapes were maybe .8 inches a pop. With space between for robot fingers and stuff, let’s guess 240 tapes per shelf.

    That comes out to about 300 terabytes. Oh. That isn’t that much these days. I mean, it’s a lot. But these days you could easily get that in spinning disks. No robot arm seek time. But with modern hardware it’d be 60 petabytes.

    I’m not sure how you’d transfer it these days. A truck, presumably. But you’d probably want to transfer a copy rather than disassemble it. That sounds slow too.







  • It’s hard. I love Harry Potter. I love Ender’s Game. But their authors hate the people I love. Not personally. They don’t know them and hate them anyway. It makes me sad. I want to share those books.

    But I guess it’s better to share books by people who don’t hate my friends. I’ll always have Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. I’ve been sharing The Golden Compass with my kids lately.

    Harry Potter was good. But I can live without it in my life. I think I will keep sharing Ender’s Game though.




  • I’ve been listening to the Andy Serkis reading it lately. First experience since I was a kid. It’s surprisingly nuanced for something so old and so baked into the popular culture. It’s kind of amazing how flattened my memory of it from childhood is.

    Dune as well. And Snowcrash too