Filesize: in physical terms

Kilobyte. Megabyte. Gigabyte. And now Terabyte. We here these terms very frequently when talking about storage space and file sizes- but what do they mean? How do they translate to items we're familiar with?

A bit is a 0 or 1. A byte - a unit capable of handling one letter, or one basic color - is equal to 8 bytes. Everything is expressed in terms of bytes.

A kilobyte is 1 000 bytes.
A megabyte is 1 000 000 bytes.
A gigabyte is 1 000 000 000 bytes.
A terabyte is 1 000 000 000 000 bytes.

(There are also binary versions, using 1024, 1048576, etc bytes, but they don't differ by more than a few percent.)

The smallest .txt files are about 4 kilobytes. A Word document starts at 12 kilobytes and a three-page essay is about 25kb. An image from a digital camera is between one and 6 megabytes. A four-minute mp3 song is about 10Mb. Photoshop CS5 - one of the largest programs in existence - requires up to 1GB of space to install.

Now, consider a piece of ordinary 8.5 x 11 (A4) paper. At 80 zeroes and ones (10 bytes) per line, 25 lines per side, 2 sides per page, a single sheet of paper works out to 500 bytes, or half a kilobyte.

Two sheets of paper, then, are equal to one kilobyte. One megabyte (2000 sheets) will stack about 6 inches high. One gigabyte (2 million sheets) of paper will fill a 5-foot cube, or one minivan - and weight 6 tons. One terabyte of data stored in this manner would require 33 C-5 Galaxy heavy lift cargo planes to carry.

But that's a wholly inefficient method of storage - we have more characters than just 0s and 1s to write. What about writing?

An average book is six by eight by one inch, 400 pages long, and has 200,000 words averaging five letters long. That works out to one million characters (plus 200,000 for the spaces), or about 1.2 megabytes. (The bible is about 4MB and was formerly a standard unit of storage capacity.

One gigabyte would then be 800 books, or several bookcases, or a 34-inch cube, weighing 1400 pounds. One terabyte would be 800,000 books, or 20 mid-sized libraries, and would require just 4 jets to carry.

Okay, then, we're gonna use electronic media. What about the good old floppy disk? It's nothing great, but at 1.44Mb in a small package (3.5" by 3.5" by 0.1") it's still superior to written storage.

One gigabyte of disks (700 disks) would stack to 7 inches square and 2 feet high. Weighing 'just' 31 pounds. You could carry a gigabyte of floppies in a milk crate. Even a terabyte of floppies could be delivered in a single 18-wheeler.

CDs, at 700 megabytes each, are even more efficient. One gig fits on a pair of CDs with room to spare. You could fit a terabyte's worth in the trunk of a small car and still have room for a cooler.

Modern memory, though, is even better. A 32 gigabyte flash drive can be held in the palm of your hand. My new laptop (more on that later) has a 500 GB hard disk...and that's the standard model. For less than 100 dollars, you can now buy a one-terabyte external hard drive that weighs just a few pounds and is smaller than a hardcover book.

The winner, though, is still the human brain. One thousand terabytes (one petabyte) of storage in just three pounds. But, for the first time in history, one dedicated person could probably acquire enough storage to match that.

The Resolution of Life

I've heard various claims for just how accurate the resolution of the human eye is. Wikipedia says a theoretical maximum of 1.2 arcminutes (60 arcmin = 1 degree = 1/360th circle) with practical limit around 1.7 arcmin; true 20/20 vision is the ability to recognize patterns at 1 arcmin line width.

(That said, however, there are certain situations where the human eye can detect much smaller resolutions. Stars only 0.1 arcseconds (1/600 arcminute) in width can be seen with the naked eye because of their high brightness. Lines against contrasting backgrounds are also more visible; with clear air, one can make out a 2-inch (5-cm) with power line from a distance of several miles. At 2 miles distance (3.2 km), this is equal to a resolution of about 1/20 arcmin, or 3 arcseconds.)

Assuming the resolution of the human eye is 1 arcmin for normal images, then, what resolution does a computer screen need? I personally sit 24 inches from my computer screen (laptop, on my lap); at that distance, one minute of arc is equal to 0.18 millimeters. Given that in the worst-case senario, you need two rows of RGB pixels to produce a color pixel, this means a pizel size of 0.09 mm - equal to about 280 pixels per inch.

My personal display is about 7.5" by 12" - equal to 2100 by 3360 pixels at this "lifelike" resolution. (In reality, it's 800 by 1280 - 38% of the resolution). The largest displays right now are usually 1920 x 1200 pixels, and about 24" by 15". An life-resolution image on one of these giant desktop monitors would have to be 4200 by 6720 pixels - a whopping 28 megapixels. (All image sizes given here are for jpeg format; multiply by about 4 for PNG format).

Which, in terms of cameras nowadays, isn't that much. You can find 14-megapixel cameras for under $300, and Canon offers a 10-megapixel camera for $100. (Nikon will sell you a top-of-the line DSLR with 24.5 MP if you have 4 figures to spare). But the problem lies in the filesize. A good estimate is one megabyte per three megapixels for an image with a reasonable amount of detail - so that giant 4200x6720 image will be almost 10 megabytes. (70 will fill a CD). Even the laptop-size image is 3 megabytes.

(It should be mentioned that, sitting 10 feet from a TV, 0.5mm pixels will suffice for reality. Few HDTVs offer this size pixel, but any laptop does. A life-resolution image for such a 60" non-widescreen (36" by 48") TV would be only 1800x2400 - taken by almost any digital camera on the market - and just 1.5 megabytes in size, equal to 90 Mb/s for 60fps HDTV. (1080p HDTV is just 1080 pixels wide, or only about 60% of the resolution of life).

So, this brings us to the real question: what is the resolution of life? Well, let's assume the human field of view is 180 degrees by 180 degrees (it's actually a bit smaller, but this makes the numbers easier). From left to right, you'll need 10800 arcminutes - 10800 pixels. Thus, at best, a human can view a 10800 x 10800 image. Any image larger than that is unnecessary unless it can be zoomed; higher resolution cannot be detected by the human eye.

Now, recall that that's on a half-sphere. If half the circumference is 10800 arcminutes - or 10800 pixels - then the radius would be 3438 pixels. For a hemisphere, surface area A = 2 pi r², or about 74.3 megapixels.

That's the magic number, then:

74.3 megapixels

. Which, among other things, means that a 25 Mb jpeg contains sufficient information to be indistinguishable from reality, even on a full-wraparound display.

Blank mind

A thought experiment: What if you took an infant human and put them in a completely blank room? Say their basic needs are taken care of (perhaps while they sleep), and they have no human contact, no indication that there's any world outside this room.

Assume they have some sort of observable device with which to communicate, say a highly intuitive touchscreen drawing program.

Will they develop intelligence? Will they develop a counting system, or a way to communicate with themselves - a language, if you will?

If you have a group of them, will they begin to communicate? Can a group of humans, starting from nothing, pass down information?


It's an experiment that is too cruel to imagine, and would outlast the researcher who started it. But what about when human brains can be accurately modeled by computer? Sentencing a computer program to a blank room is no torture, and with a sufficiently fast computer the timescale can be greatly accelerated.

Eldritch Abominations, as drawn by your kids

Lovecraftian horrors and the Great Old Ones, as drawn by elementary schoolers. Exactly what I needed to brighten my night.

Caught Red-handed

...sortof.

This morning, for reasons that are still beyond me, I was playing with a pen. Not just any pen, but a malfunctioning red pen, one of the rollerball gel ones. Though still nearly full of ink, it mysteriously refused to write.

So, of course, I was sticking a dowel into the ink tube, trying to push enough ink to clear the blockage. Of course, I was using a dowel almost the exact same diameter as the inside of the plastic ink tube, and gel ink, like water, is a mostly incompressible fluid.

One slip of the hand and blorp (actual sound effect), the tip of the ink tube falls out and there's red ink all over my hand. And I mean red. It was more or less the color of fresh blood, and about the same consistency.

I rushed upstairs, rinsed my hand in the sink, and... it didn't come off. My right hand had two fingers (plus thumb) literally stained blood red with liberal amounts of sanguine ink.

Fortunately, lava soap (soap with small bits of abrasive pumice) helped, as did a small amount of 120-grit sandpaper. Though it absolutely stained my skin cells, it didn't go very deep. In fact, I was going to take a picture, but it's almost gone now.

Still, though, I have a lot of pink skin on my right hand.

"I for one welcome our new robot overlords"

Spoken by the human Jeopardy! champion, Ken Jennings, after getting his fanny kicked by a computer.

IBM's Watson is the first computer to beat humans at what they do best: memorizing random trivia to win game shows.

Err... make that "processing the complex syntax of oddly worded English sentences to derive an answer, a process which combines knowledge across many disciplines and requires understanding of many difficult-to-process parts of communication including puns and pattern recognition of similar names."

Watson beat two of the world's best Jeopardy players at their own game:


I, too, welcome our new overlords.

Mathematical Beauty

This is one of the neatest videos I have ever seen. It's based around the Fibonacci numbers and the Golden ratio and how they relate to nature, but it's really about mathematical beauty.

Take the four minutes to watch it. Definitely turn the quality up to 720p in the lower right-hand corner; you may need to watch it here.

The Trees are... Glowing?

So, scientists have managed to make glowing trees.

SCIENCY GOODNESS AHOY

It's been known for a while that chlorophyll releases light when excited by ultraviolet radiation with a 400 nm (nanometer) wavelength. What these researchers did, is they added gold nanoparticles to the leaves. The little spiky nanoparticles absorb different (285 nm) ultraviolet radiation (from the sun, or other sources) and put out 400nm UV light, which then causes chlorophyll.

Since it requires UV radiation to work, I'm not sure what the use is, but someone will surely find a use.

(Coming soon: really, really high-tech red-light districts!)

Elementary School Scientists

What sort of science did you do in elementary school? It was pretty basic stuff, right? Units covering the very basic bits of biology and chemistry and physics. Basic cell biology, weather, simple machines, stuff like that. Not much in the way of actual lab 'experiments'; they didn't trust us to work with beakers and balances until seventh grade, and such things as hot plates and acids were completely out of the question until high school.

Doing an actual controlled experiment - that's never been done before - with live animals, and getting published in a legitimate scientific journal? Utterly out of the question.

Yet, that's what exactly what 25 elementary school students between ages 8 and 10 did in Britain. (BBC News article)

The children designed the experiment, asked the question, hypothesized results, and wrote the majority of the paper. The only things done by the teacher and an assisting scientist, Beau Lotto, were to supply trained bees and to transcribe the student writings.

And they did indeed get results. Although they didn't refer to previous scientific literature - which would have been above their reading abilities - and they hadn't been trained in the use of statistical analysis, they were exploring a hole in scientific knowledge. They found that bumblebees "can use a combination of colour and spatial relationships in deciding which colour of flower to forage from."

They determined that it was possible to train bees to follow a logical pattern in determining where to seek found. In this case, they taught bees to go to the center of an opposing circular pattern of colors - i.e, to go to the blue center of a yellow flower, or the yellow center of a blue flower. This is different from normal circumstances, in which bees are attracted to flowers of a certain color.

The full paper, published in Biology Letters, a publication of the prestigious Royal Society, can be read in full online here. If you've got half an hour to read and understand, it's an excellent read, and more accessible than many scientific papers.

The paper was peer-reviewed by several other scientists, who determined that despite the lack of references or statistical analyses, the paper was "cleverly and correctly designed and carried out with proper controls" and "[the students} hold their own among experiments carried out by highly trained specialists". High praise indeed.

Just as impressive as the results is the repercussions of the experiment. They were denied public funding for the experiment because it was believed that children could not run an experiment that would generate results, so the experiment was funded by Lotto's LottoLab group. But they did indeed get results; this should show us all that the importance of research is not by who runs it or their ages, but what we can learn from it.

The students, I imagine, have also been impacted. They have been taught that they can do real science at a young age, that there is littler than they cannot do. That alone is incredibly empowering, and I imagine that those 25 children will be largely ambitious and successful as adults. But they have also been taught that science is interesting, it is alive, that it is everwhere. That science is about asking questions and finding a way to test them. ("Ideas are tested by experiment") How many scientists and engineers will there be in that group of twenty-five, how many whose abilities for scientific thinking were unmasked by this?

After all, their "principal finding" had a second part, just as important as the first part: "We also discovered that science is cool and fun because you get to do stuff that no one has ever done before."

I for one welcome our non-Phosphorus-needing bacterial overlords

I don't think I need any more explanation.

More deep-sea gigantism

There's a lot of really cool species that exhibit deep-sea gigantism. The most famous is perhaps the giant squid. It's huge - females can reach 43 feet (13 meters) - and have been reported all over the globe. They have a complex nervous system, an advanced brain (somewhat like cuttlefish...) and dinner-plate eyes. And they're not even the biggest squid in the deep sea.

That honor belongs to the colossal squid, which is fairly similar. It can reach 14 meters - 46 feet - long and its arms not only have the suckers and teeth of the giant squid, but also swiveling and three-pointed hooks. They can take on sperm whales.

You know the tiny pillbugs that probably inhabit your basement? Imagine them a foot long, and you've got the giant isopod. It's related to crabs and lobsters, only it's disgusting and not known to be tasty. They're found in the deep waters of the Atlantic, they really are related to pill bugs, and they can go up to 2200 meters - 7000 feet - down into the depths.

Other giant abyssal species are edible, though. The Japanese spider crab grows up to 13 feet claw-to-claw, with a 16-inch-wide body (carapace). They can live up to 100 years old.

Possibly the single biggest deep-sea species is the appropriately named King of herrings, the giant oarfish. It can grow up to 56 feet long - that's 17 meters. You could lay the head next to the driver on a school bus, and the tail would still stick out the back door. It's so big that it's believed to be responsible for some sea serpent sightings.

Deep-Sea Gigantism

Every child has heard of the great land animals: elephants, giraffes, anacondas, hippopotamuses. But few know of the deep sea creatures that are equally as strangely large. It's a phenomenon called deep-sea gigantism.

It's a manifestation of several factors. The first is the water itself. Water weighs one gram per cubic centimeter, which means that an animal like a fish, which also weighs approximately 1 g/mL, is effectively weightless. It does not have to support its own weight like a land animal does, thereby removing one of the largest barriers to scaling - the square-cube law. An organism's weight goes up with the cube of its size, but the cross section of its skeleton only goes up with the square of its size. Thus, the larger the animal, the larger its bones must be to support its own weight in air. But, marine animals are mostly except from the rule. A 100-foot blue whale does not require the immense bones of a 100-foot sauropod dinosaur like Seismosaurus. The whale has bones only a few inches thick; the dinosaur's leg bones are over a foot thick.

Other physical factors also come into play. Scarcer food and nutrients at great depth mean sexual maturity is delayed, meaning the organism will grow larger before its growth stops at maturity. The freezing-cold temperatures at depths of thousands of feet mean that larger animals have advantages in body temperature regulation and reducing the need to constantly keep moving - thus requiring fewer resources.

Some organisms also manage to grow large because they can use the massive energy available from hydrothermal vents called black smokers. Giant tube worms can reach almost 8 feet long (2.4 meters), tolerate extremely high levels of hydrogen sulfide (H₂S) from vents, and survive depths up to several miles deep. They're basically giant cylinders that house bacteria which create nutrients like oxygen and carbon dioxide in a process called chemosynthesis, which the worm then feeds upon. The red tip of the worms contains a specialized hemoglobin that can carry oxygen with sulfides in the environment - most hemoglobins cannot.

No more Natural Gene Patents!

Via Blag Hag comes the welcome news that the federal government has issued a nonbinding legal brief saying that corporations should not be able to patent genes that occur naturally in humans and other animals. It's not legally binding, so it's uncertain whether the Patent Office will enforce it, and there's still other issues that need to be dealt with. But, it's a huge step in the right direction, and it represents a pretty big change in policy.

Basically, for years, companies have been able to patent human genes. That's right, someone could claim all legal rights to a piece of DNA that occurs in millions of humans - or everyone, just because they were the first to isolate it. That's like claiming exclusive rights to providing a new species to zoos, just because you discovered it, or claiming a royalty on all jewelry that includes a mineral your discovered. It meant that other companies and frequently research universities could not do research on that gene without getting sued.

The brief does say, though, that artificial manipulations of genes should still be able to be patented. This is both good and bad. Good, because it provides an incentive to not only discover genes, but do beneficial research on them. Bad, because it could still stifle important medical research. Also, companies that genetically modify plants have a nasty habit of maliciously suing small farmers who have had GM seeds drift into their field from nearby fields. Which, legally defensible or not, is just plain wrong.

Longest things I have ever written

These are the longest things I have ever written. All are over 1100 words - the point at which a paper or outline takes serious work. I've got tons of labs, essays, and outlines between 900 and 1050 words, an amount of work which can be done in one afternoon, without a huge amount of work.

Longer than that takes a lot of work. The more recent outlines were spread out over 2-3 afternoons, as were most of my ninth-grade bio outlines. The 9th grade English and 10th grade History thesis papers were written over a week each. The three thesis papers and the Bushy Point Beach paper since then were all one-evening productions, taking until 1 or 2 in the morning. I've found it's easier to focus and write a cohesive paper that way, even if it is somewhat irresponsible. However, with those four items, I had extensive planning, notes and data, and I'd been thinking about them for a while.

Bolded is my chapter 16 outline for UConn ECE Marine Science, a college-level course taught at my high school by a biology teacher. It's the longest outline I have ever written. It's longer than many short stories. And I'm very proud of it.

1) Pearl Harbor thesis paper - History - grade 11 - 2948 words, 8.5 pages

2) Electoral College thesis paper - English - grade 10 - 2923 words, 9.1 pages

3) Aquaculture thesis paper - English - grade 9 - 2601 words, 7.7 pages

4) "Johnny Mnemonic" thesis paper - English - grade 11 - 2490 words, 6.9 pages

5) Bushy Point Beach report - Marine Science - grade 12 - 2254 words, 7.0 pages

6) Chapter 16 (Plankton) outline - Marine Science - grade 12 - 2180 words, 5.4 pages

7) Chapter 3 (Molecules) outline - Biology - grade 9 - 1861 words, 4.9 pages

8) Chapter 12 (Coasts) outline - Marine Science - grade 12 - 1711 words, 4.6 pages

9) Neutrality Acts thesis paper - History - grade 10 - 1601 words, 4.7 pages

10) Chapter 2 (Chemistry) outline - grade 9 - 1398 words, 3.9 pages

11) Chapter 4 (Cells) outline - Biology - grade 9 - 1361 words, 4.6 pages

12) Chapter 5 (Working cells) outline - Biology - grade 9 - 1239 words, 4.7 pages

13) Chapter 6 (Respiration) outline - Biology - 1194 words, 3.4 pages

Goodbye, Rinderpest

Yesterday, for only the second time in history, scientists announced that they had successfully eradicated a viral disease. Rinderpest, a cattle disease, has not infected any animal since 2001.

It's a nasty virus, with near-100% mortality rates in infected populations. Some experiments in innoculation were done in the late 18th century, and vaccination was somewhat successful early in the 20th century. However, the real advance was Walter Plowright's tissue culture rinderpest vaccine (TCRV). Three million dollars of vaccinations have saved 45 billion dollars of cattle.

Seaweed!

On Friday, my Marine Science teacher offered an incentive: for every species of seaweed you bring in for a lab, you get an extra point of bonus on the lab.

So, yesterday, I went down to Waterford Beach Park to gather seaweed. The good news is, I got at least 10 species, including the three major types - green, brown, and red algae.

The bad news is, my feet are still cold.

I've also mostly overcome my repulsion of seaweed. Handing a whole bunch of gross slimy stuff kindof makes you immune, it appears.

I found a whole bunch of different types, including sea lettuce (Ulva lactuca), various kinds of kelp (Laminaria), and Palmaria.

Boat Ride

Well, it was supposed to be a fishing trip. We were going to go out into the Race - the deep channel at the eastern entrance of Long Island Sound - and catch bluefish and striped bass.

As soon as we rounded the small islands at Avery Point and hit open water, though, we were suddenly bucking seven-foot waves. We were in a fairly light 50-foot boat, and we pitched and rolled. We rolled both forwards-backwards and side-to-side, with the motions separated by about a quarter cycle so the boat rolled effectively in a circle. I have a cast-iron stomach* and I soon got my sea legs**, but others did not, and a couple folks had, shall we say, technicolor belches.

We got out near the Race, and the waves were too strong to risk getting trapped in the Race for two hours should the waves get worse while the tide was going out. So, we tried a spot by Fisher's Island, but the fish weren't biting and the waves were too strong.

We then tried all manner of spots in the Thames River, but no one got so much as a nibble. I did learn how to attach a dead fish to a fishing line as bait. It's... rather disgusting.

We tried to go out in the mouth of the river a bit, but the waves were 8 feet high and rolled nastily. At the top of waves, we were fairly close to momentary weightlessness. So, we had to head back in with no success whatsoever.

But, because we had no luck, Project Oceanology invited us back later in the month. For free. Which is incredibly nice of them.

We'll still have the fish fry in class tomorrow. Just... not with fish we caught.


* I am pretty much immune to motion sickness of all types. I survived the 6-degree-of-freedom chair at Space Camp. No roller coaster known to man can turn my stomach.

** A skill honed on subway trains. The same balance that allows me to walk down a T train squealing around a corner, or stand upright through the stops and starts of an NYC subway train without a handhold, is perfect for walking on a rolling deck. The boat just requires a little timing, so that the side-to-side motion gets me where I want to go.

Marine Science Paper

The final toll:

7 pages of text (1.5 spaced 12-point font)
2254 words

2 giant processor-eating 3D graphs

9 pages of data printouts

Between plant data and elevation data for both 2004 and 2010, slightly under 1400 data points

And a whole lot of time. But it's done, turned in yesterday. Now I can get back to the important stuff, like blogging, and Nethack.

Oh yeah, and college essays and homework. Those too.

Much Frustration

We're working on big giant projects for Marine Science. 6-page papers, with research, graphs, everything. I'm lucky enough to have two intelligent partners who care about their grades. But that doesn't mean there's not a lot of frustration for me.

First, the computers. As I mentioned a few days ago, most of the computers are old crappy laptops. The internet doesn't work on many of them. Or the battery is bad. Or it doesn't log on. Or the screen hinges are randomly loose. Can't get any work on them.

Even the good Macs have troubles. Some can't run the internet browser and Excel at the same time. They run an outdated version of Safari. Frequently, instead of saving, Excel crashes.

The most frustrating thing, though, is the data. One group, responsible for two of the seven elevation plots, completely bolloxed the data up. I noticed yesterday, when the teacher was gone on a field trip. It took till the end of class today to fix it and three other errors that popped up.


BLAGHAGHARGHARGHAGHAGH

Blag hag

I recently stumbled across Blag Hag, an awesome blog about atheism and biology and politics and delicious sciencey goodness. Jen McReight is seriosuly awesome, a published biologist, and also an authority about all things nontheist. (Warning: it's frequently NSFW). I've spent about the last three hours reading through months of posts (including a 24-hour, 48-post blogathon for charity).

One of many, many interesting things I've found is this this about male privilege. Basically, as a guy, I have advantages in a whole lot of social situations. I didn't ask for them, I don't try to take advantage of them, but I have them, sheerly for having the luck to get a Y chromosome.

It's downright sobering, just how much latent sexism there is, even when things are supposed to be equal. Makes you think.

Lest I end this post on a downer, consider this fact, gleaned from a site she linked to: there is a genus of snails with the name Turbo. Yes.