Data Sure is Neat, Part 2
How much information does your typical book hold? If you haven’t read it yet, go back and read our last blog about how much data is stored in the Library of Congress, then come back here to learn more about the everyday applications of data and how much we store on a day-to-day basis.
Examining the Bit
Data is made up of bits, or strings of ones and zeros. There are 7 bits in English characters and 8 bits in a byte.
Data is stored in ones and zeros because that’s the way we have been doing it for the past 70 years. We like to use the example of a machine that has seven lights on it to represent data. If the light is on, then it’s a zero, and if it’s off, it’s a one. The combinations of lights translate into various characters, like letters, numbers, and symbols, and when strung together in large arrays, can represent vast quantities of data to be read by a system.
Magnets use this method to store data, and they are the backbone of the present-day hard drive. With spinning platters that look an awful lot like a stack of CDs, the hard drive uses magnets to read and write data to the drive. These devices are sensitive and can detect something as tiny as something billions of times smaller than an eyelash cut into a hundred different pieces. Pretty shocking stuff.
Basically, the hard drive was crucial to the development of data storage, and it remains to this day a common staple in the office environment and even for consumer electronics. Solid state drives, or SSDs, are also quite popular, and they run using electrical charges to tiny transistors. Since they don’t rely on mechanical movements or magnets, they are the preferred choice for mobile devices, tablets, and laptops, and they can run a lot faster than your average desktop computer HDD as a result.
How Much Data is Contained On Your Smartphone?
If the US Library of Congress holds 51 Terabytes, how much does the average smartphone hold?
A typical high-end smartphone has about a quarter or half a terabyte, but if your smartphone has a Micro SD card slot, you could potentially expand its storage by an entire terabyte. That is about a 50th of the Library of Congress, or over a million books. It’s pretty shocking, considering how small those little guys are.
Here are just a couple of ways you can use a 1 Terabyte Micro SD card:
200,000 songs
250 full-length movies in full HD
5 million pages of PDF documents
250,000 photos taken with a 12 megapixel camera
Essentially every video game from the 80s and 90s.
Or you could store 10,000 copies of Windows 95 and Microsoft Office 95.
How Much Data Does Humanity Produce?
Humanity has produced 44 zettabytes as of 2020, and this would require 44 billion 1 TB Micro SD cards. This number could double by the end of this year, and by 2025, it could exceed 200 zettabytes. Absolutely mind-blowing.
Considering the fact that more than 62 percent of all people on the planet use social media, send emails, move information from one point to the next, and so on, this isn’t that surprising. With 300 billion emails sent daily and over 500 hours of YouTube content uploaded daily, data generation is not slowing down anytime soon.
Look, Data is Important
We hope that this look at data generation has made you look at your own data in a different light. Yes, new data is created all the time, but you can save a lot of time and energy by protecting the data you already store with data backup and disaster recovery solutions. Failing to do so is like doing the same work twice; there’s no reason for it, so don’t do it.
Infradapt can be your go-to resource for data backup solutions. To learn more, contact us at 484-546-2001.
https://www.infradapt.com/news/data-sure-is-neat-part-2/
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The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics
Post #9 on Physics and Astronomy, 06/11/23
The Nobel Prize. Arguably one of the highest achievements someone could attain. This year, three laureates won the Nobel Prize for their work in attoseconds. Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz, and Anne L’Huiller found a way to create extraordinarily small pulses of light that can be used to measure the processes in which electrons move.
Your first question may be: what actually is an attosecond? We all know that there are prefixes to seconds to measure increasing or decreasing magnitudes, i.e. milliseconds, nanoseconds, etc. Attoseconds, however, in comparison, are so small that there are as many in one second as there have been seconds since the dawn of the universe.
Before this, a femtosecond was regarded as the limit for the shortest pulse of light we could produce. For reference, there are 1,000,000,000,000,000 femtoseconds in one second. One femtosecond is tiny as-is, and there are 1,000 attoseconds within one femtosecond.
The reason why this work is so pivotal is because it enables for the investigation of processes that were previously imperceptible, the first one that comes to mind being the mechanisms of electrons.
For us, it is important to understand how electrons work, after all, a lot of daily appliances are electrical. This Nobel Prize work opens those doors. Another good example is the function of microprocessors. If they worked based on attoseconds, they could process information a billion times faster.
This, currently, is out of reach, but scientists hope to be able to manipulate, or control, electron motion for various reasons, one being for electronics, like aforementioned.
All three of the Nobel laureates had held the record for the shortest pulse of light at one point. Agostini’s team, in 2001, flashed a pulse lasting only 250 attoseconds. This was shortly beaten by L’Huillier in 2003, with 170 attoseconds. Krausz beat this in 2008 with a pulse lasting 80 attoseconds. The current record, achieved by Hans Jakob Woerner, stands in the Guinness World Records at an astonishing 43 attoseconds.
Who do you think will win the next Nobel Prize?
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