Monday, June 15, 2009

IBM says world will drown in data next year

According to IBM, "Experts predict that by 2010, the amount of digital information will double every 11 hours."

That's really, really scary. If the amount of data were to double every 11 hours, it would quadruple every day. Over a month the quantity of data would increase by a factor of 36,893,488,147,419,103,232 (roughly speaking). Over a year it would increase by a factor of ...

No, I'm not going to work it out. But if anyone from IBM reads this please can you buy a calculator for the marketing department.

Saturday, June 13, 2009

Element 112 needs a name

A German team is looking for a name for an element that's just about to join the periodic table.

Element 112 is super-heavy and very unstable. It falls apart in milliSeconds.

Gordonium?