Category Archives: Math

August 5, 2011

Sideband #28: 2 ^ 64, ‘K!

I’d planned to do this later, probably for Sideband #64, but in honor of my parents 64th wedding anniversary (2 parents, 64 years, okay!) this numerical rumination gets queue-bumped to now.

Just recently I wrote about 64-bit numbers and how 64 bits allows you to count to the (small, compared to where we’re going) number:

2⁶⁴ = 18,446,744,073,709,551,616

That’s 18 exabytes (or 18 giga-gigabyes). Just to put it into perspective, if we were counting seconds, it amounts to 584,942,417,355 years; more than 500 billion years! (That’s the American, short-scale billion.)

Leave a comment | tags: 64-bit, 64K, 8-bit, big numbers, binary, bits, exabyte, powers of two | posted in Computers, Math, Sideband

August 2, 2011

Sideband #25: 64-Bit Address

By Wyrd Smythe

A long, long time ago on a USENET far, far away, I was part of a debate that started with the idea that, even if we had disk drives with 64-bit addressing, people would still fill them up with videos, images and whatnot.

The idea grew from some of us old-timers reminiscing about our first brick-sized 5-meg hard drive and how we thought, “Gee, I’ll never fill that up!” (And look how that turned out; I have single image files that wouldn’t fit on that drive!)

The premise was that, even with seriously gigantic hard drives, we’d still manage to fill them and need more, more, more…

1 Comment | tags: 64-bit, big numbers, bytes, disk drive, exabyte, hard drive, petabyte, terabyte, USENET | posted in Computers, Math, Movies, Sideband

July 16, 2011

Sideband #13: The Number 42

By Wyrd Smythe

Nearly all science fiction fans share a meme about the number 42. This meme comes from the Douglas Adams book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, one of the great “modern classics” (an apparent oxymoron, but it is just shorthand for ‘a recent work that is so good that someday it will be counted among the classics’). The book is the first in the “increasingly misnamed” trilogy that shares its name.

The trilogy is “increasingly misnamed” in that it now has five books. The joke is that, in science fiction, trilogies are as common as aliens, spaceships and time travel. In fact, depending on the context, there are two trilogies that have easily earned the sobriquet, “The Trilogy.” (Issac Asimov‘s Foundation series in the context of pure SF; and, of course, J.R.R. Tolkien‘s Lord of the Rings books in the context of SF + fantasy.)

In any event, the number, 42, is the answer to the question.

1 Comment | tags: 42, Douglas Adams, Hitchhikers Guide, Isaac Asimov, J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, reading, trilogy | posted in Basics, Books, Math, Sideband

July 13, 2011

Sideband #10: A Full Hand

By Wyrd Smythe

Sidebands are 10; a full hand; a (very small) odometer moment.

The accident of genetics and evolution that gives us ten fingers (and ten toes) causes us to count in tens and celebrate things that occur on tens boundaries.

Turning 30, 40 or 50 years of age is viewed as cause to bring out the black balloons and mocking birthday cards. Yet celebrating 30, 40, 50 or 60 years of marriage is cause to celebrate (especially these divorce-prone days).

4 Comments | tags: decimal, Derek Jeter, odometer, tens | posted in Basics, Math, Sideband