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Sadly, after his chemical castration, Turing committed suicide by eating a cyanide-laced apple.

Bill Gates is often misquoted as having said, “no one will ever need more than 640K of memory,” in the 1980s. 24 years ago, my Commodore 64 personal computer ran games like “Mail-Order Monsters” and “Archon” on a mere 64 kilobytes of memory. This was a huge advance over my 1977 Atari 2600 game console, which ran “Pong” and “Space Invaders” on a scant 128 bytes of memory. Today my dual-core Pentium uses a gigabyte of RAM, about 7.8 million times as much memory as the Atari, and, after upgrading to Windows Vista, even that doesn’t cut it anymore.

From bits to bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, and, with impending DVD technological advances, terabytes, our computing power grows exponentially. This empirically observed fact is known as Moore’s Law, named after Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, who observed in 1965 that the number of transistors on an integrated component doubles every 18 months. In other words, computers double in power every year and a half. This Law of Computing has held true now for over 40 years in an explosion of processing power that allows for what history will record as the Information Age, the times in which we are currently living.

Now it’s time to familiarize ourselves with a new measurement, the exabyte. We can thank research firm IDC’s white paper The Expanding Digital Universe for introducing us to this latest milestone, which estimates the human race collectively produced 161 exabytes of data in 2006.

So what’s an exabyte? To visualize this number, it’s helpful to begin at the smallest measurement of data, the bit. A bit is a 1 or 0, “on” or “off,” “true” or “false.” Up one level from this binary state we have the byte, which is 8 bits. If you open Notepad on your computer, type any one letter and save the file, you have generated one byte of data, which you can verify by right-clicking on the file and selecting “Properties.”

Every additional character typed and saved will add another byte to the file’s size. Every 1,000 characters is a kilobyte, and every 1,000 kilobytes a megabyte. A 90,000-word novel translates into about 0.5 megabytes¹. An exabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of data, or 500 billion novels. That’s 77 novels written for every person on Earth², and we are producing 161 times that much data, 230 billion CDs worth³, or nearly 12,400 novels for every person on Earth every year.

We produced more data last year than has been produced in the last 5,000 years of human history. That’s just for 2006, and that’s only the beginning. “In 2010, the amount of digital information created and copied worldwide will rise six fold to a staggering 988 exabytes,” that’s 12 Petabytes short of having to adopt yet another term of measurement, the Zettabyte.

The search engine Google is named after the largest number the nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner could think of, the googol. It is the number one followed by 100 zeros. By one recent estimate, it takes 450,000 computers networked on server farms to run the Google search engine, indexing 8 billion Web pages every year. I wonder when we’ll be talking about our hard drives (or maybe they’ll be flash drives by then) in terms of googlebytes?

And then we still have the googolplex waiting for us in the distant future, the number one followed by a googol of zeroes.

¹500,000 characters in Novel based on a Microsoft Word Count and Character count of one of my novels, which came out to 450,000 characters for a 82,000 world novel. So this is a very conservative estimate.

²1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes translates to
1,000,000,000,000 megabytes which translates to
500,000,000,000 novels divided by 6.5 billion human beings

³CDs hold 700MB of Data
700,000,000
161,000,000,000,000,000,000
230,000,000,000

“This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through… a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.”
- Lyndon Johnson, 1965

This extremely well-researched talk given by Naomi Oreskes and posted to Scientific American is generating some discussion online, and should generate much more. It reveals in detail how the same people have used the exact same rhetoric over and over again to prevent political action on a multitude of scientific issues where there was a strong, broad consensus.

Some notes I took while watching it:

“The Tobbacco Strategy”

The Science is uncertain

Concerns are exaggerated

Technology will solve the problem

There is no need for government interference

There’s much much more to Oreskes’ talk. If you can find an hour, even to let it just play in the background, you’ll be surprised at what you hear:

Many books I like to read with a yellow highlighter, reading Stephen Wolfram’s ANKOS I was compelled to whip out a red pen. While his 1,000-plus page field-guide to cellular automata and complexity theory is brimming with fantastic examples of all shapes, sizes, and dimensions, Wolfram’s writing and failure to acknowledge accomplishments in the field beyond his own research make this book a difficult read.

Wolfram violates the rule of science writing that you must disassociate yourself from your research. I was skeptical of the importance of this principle, until I saw what happens when you don’t follow it:

Just over twenty years ago I made what at first seemed like a small discovery: a computer experiment of mine showed something I did not expect. But the more I investigated, the more I realized that what I had seen was the beginning of a crack in the very foundations of existing science, and a first clue towards a whole new kind of science.

This book is the culmination of nearly twenty years of work that I have done to develop that new kind of science. I had never expected it would take anything like that long, but I have discovered vastly more than I ever thought possible, and in fact what I have done now touches almost every existing area of science, and quite a bit besides.

Wow! Stephen Wolfram considers his book an Earth-shattering iconoclasm that will revolutionize science, and it’s all on Wolfram himself and his 20 years of research; however, despite his repeated use of “I” and casual dismissal of all the research preceding him, Wolfram is not publishing in a vacuum, and that hurts his efforts profoundly.

Put simply, Wolfram believes he has discovered Emergence, the idea that complex systems and patterns can arise out of simple processes or rules. Wolfram mentions searching for patterns in primes, but never mentions Ulam’s spiral. Mentions seeking patterns in pi, but never mentions Carl Sagan’s Contact, which entertained the idea first. Chaos/Complexity Theory gets mentioned in a footnote. A footnote!!! Wolfram never acknowledges that he is standing on the shoulders of giants like Alan Turing, John Von Neumann, or Edward Lorenz.

Maybe Wolfram isn’t ignoring all the history behind his subject, maybe in the 15 years of writing his book, he simply never noticed that it’s all been discovered without him, before he even started writing. If we were to lose Einstein’s Theory of Relativity today, someone else would uncover it within a few years. That’s the nature of truth, everyone can arrive at it independently.

The problem is that Wolfram’s failure to explore the near century’s worth of work by his peers on this subject cripples his presentation. Instead of a broad, eclectic overview of ideas from across the field of research shedding light on each of his examples, we are forced to look at them with Wolfram’s blinders on, and given only his insights alone. This is a frustrating treatment, teasing at enlightenment, but never yielding any depth.

Wolfram hasn’t invented anything. Speculation isn’t invention. In the end nothing has been discovered. There is only more wonder. People speculated on these patterns before Wolfram, and they will speculate after him.

Cellular automata, emergence, chaos theory, and other incredibly complex mathematical wonders produced by basic rules allowed to play out over time are absolutely fascinating concepts. You can lose yourself for hours staring at fractals. You can wonder at the increasing wave function of unpredictability produced on a system by something as seemingly mathematically insignificant as a butterfly flapping its wings. You can ponder infinitely complex numbers like pi and phi impossibly running away forever, while appreciating the way they somehow manifest in nature. It defies logic.

Luckily, Wolfram’s book repeatedly appeals to his readers to take up this subject, to explore the phenomena of which he provides so many wonderful examples. Anyone experiencing an Ionian Enchantment from Wolfram’s book will continue his train of thought and discover Turing, Neumann, and myriad of mathematicians and computer scientists immersed in this field. They will discover the whole realm of mighty minds who have also immersed themselves in these puzzles.

Then they will return to A New Kind of Science, and appreciate that Stephen Wolfram has put together a very good coffee table book on cellular automata, just not a revolutionary one.

The Hall of Gems reminded me of this quote from Henry David Thoreau:

“When the frost comes out in the spring, and even in a thawing day in the winter, the sand begins to flow down the slopes like lava, sometimes bursting out through the snow and overflowing it where no sand was to be seen before. Innumerable little streams overlap and interlace one with another, exhibiting a sort of hybrid product, which obeys half way the law of currents, and half way that of vegetation. As it flows it takes the forms of sappy leaves or vines, making heaps of pulpy sprays a foot or more in depth, and resembling, as you look down on them, the laciniated, lobed, and imbricated thalluses of some lichens; or you are reminded of coral, of leopard’s paws or birds’ feet, of brains or lungs or bowels, and excrements of all kinds.”

It was amazing how organic so many of these rocks look, some like flowers, others like candy, others like excrement. The intricate geometry found in others was fascinating as well.

Check out the complete flickr set here.

Per Bylund of Colliding Softly blog has an article the Dittoheads are all chirping about, The Myth of Recycling, where he derides the Swedish recycling program as “coercive environmentalism”:

This coercive recycling structure is set up in layers, where the consumer (”producer” of waste) gets to do most of the work of sorting, cleaning, and transporting the trash to collection centers. Government-appointed companies then empty the containers and transport the materials to regional centers where the trash is prepared for recycling. And then everything is transported to centralized recycling plants where the materials are prepared for reuse or burning. Finally what is left of the materials is sold to companies and individuals at subsidized prices so that they can make “environmentally friendly” choices.

The Swedish recycling policies, as Bylund describes them, place responsibility on the individual for their waste products. He maintains that such a system of personal responsibility is extremely socialist and bad for the market: “Imagine a whole population spending time and money cleaning their garbage and driving it around the neighborhood rather than working or investing in a productive market!”

So personal responsibility equals socialism, because the government is making Swedes assume responsibility. This leaves full-service government waste management or government-sponsored market-incentives (ie. tax cuts) as the only alternatives. How either of these alternatives is somehow less socialist I leave to the reader to muddle out. Bylund’s point is that recycling is a costly waste of time and does not actually save energy or resources.

Following similar logic in 2002, New York City gave up recycling to save money, only to quickly reinstitute the practice and expand it dramatically. Why? Because recycling saves money, energy, and resources.

The libertarian news magazine The Economist, came to the same conclusion in a recent article:

Extracting metals from ore, in particular, is extremely energy-intensive. Recycling aluminium, for example, can reduce energy consumption by as much as 95%. Savings for other materials are lower but still substantial: about 70% for plastics, 60% for steel, 40% for paper and 30% for glass. Recycling also reduces emissions of pollutants that can cause smog, acid rain and the contamination of waterways.

Is mandatory recycling unfair? Is personal responsibility unfair? Why should everyone who recycles have to pay for the landfill space of people who don’t have the aptitude or motivation to sort their waste into different containers?

Waitaminute! Why the heck are Swedes still sorting their recyclables anyways?!?! Really, what Bylund is complaining about is the inefficiency of the Swedish mandatory recycling system, and that’s all he’s complaining about. In America, we have overcome this sorting hurdle by giving citizens two great big bins, one for recyclables, one for everything else, and let machines sort it out at the plant, in a process known as single-stream recycling, perhaps Bylund should argue for modernizing the Swedish recycling system instead of arguing for recidivism.

That is, unless sorting trash into two bins is still too complicated for Swedes.

: P

 
Two videos for emphasis (this one of actual gameplay):

 
Anybody remember SimLife? I played that #$%&ing game for weeks and never designed one single sustainable life form.

Phil Plait on My Facebook

Look upon my Facebook Friends List ye mighty and despair!!!

Author of the Bad Astronomy blog, Phil Plait’s book Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing is highly recommended by the National Science Teachers Association. He has a new book, Death from the Skies, due out in 2008 about the multiple ways our cosmos could squash us like bugs. With such an unassuming title, I fear it might not do well with our sensationalism-starved masses.

; )

Plait is also a regular contributor to the Huffington Post. His politics #$&%ing rock and his logic is impeccable. Unfortunately, the Huffington Post won’t let me RSS just Phil Plait.

Most importantly of all, Plait got pwned by Wil Wheaton at Star Trek fandom. Anyone who would dare even face Wil Wheaton in a battle of trecknobabble has much much larger cajones that I could ever aspire to.

I see Plait as what Chris Mooney refers to as a Science Ambassador, like Carl Sagan or EO Wilson… only hipper.

This latest addition to my Facebook Trophy friends will further serve my quest for World Domination. You hear me you high school jocks? Your days are numbered!!!