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------------------------- 2421 - INFORMATION - Too Much Information
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- Today there is too much information and most of it is false. You have to be a discerning listener, reader, and learner if you are able to navigate trough it all. It is not just politics; it is science too.
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- In 1800 there were 1000 scientists in the World. Today there are millions and by 2020 there will be one billion. The facts and papers published in thousands of scientific journals just keep piling up. Science is expanding into new fields. For example cosmology or nanotechnology did not exist as a science years ago.
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- The true challenge posed by the runaway growth in information is to unearth useful bits from the mountains of dross. Dross is another word for refuse, waste matter.
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- The vast majority of scientific ideas are wrong and useless.
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- 99.8 % of the ideas put forth by scientists are wrong and will never be included in the body of scientific fact. What makes science is the principle that any idea must be capable of being proven wrong and it must be verifiable by experiment, real world data. Only 0.2% of ideas turn out to be correct.
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- When you enter a scientific field in which thousands of smart people have been toiling for decades, your chances of striking a new discovery are tiny. The fraction of knowledge that is truly scientific has been decreasing for hundreds of years because the amount of nonscientific information has expanded far more rapidly.
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- We have gone from being hunter-gathers of information to being filter feeders. We are like the oyster in an information age.
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- The information processing revolution has afforded people an unprecedented opportunity to generate and disseminate information. The blogosphere has expanded to dwarf all other forms of the written word.
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- The one exception might be software, but who reads software programs anyway. The number of blogs in the world is doubling every 6 months. My blog is listed at the end of his Review.
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- Wikipedia has 6,000,000 pages of home brewed knowledge. In this sea of noise. How do you find really important information?
- A cubic centimeter of water contains 100,000 billion, billion atoms. Each atom can contain a bit of information. But, the majority of bits is random. And the Universe tends toward randomness. The is called entropy.
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- This trend towards disorder is what heats up your car engine and requires your body to operate at 98.6 F. DNA provides us with a small number of nonrandom bits.
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- There are ordered forms of energy contained in sunlight and in the sugars of plants. The primary function of life in the Universe is to glean those few bits of useful, nonrandom, information from the great quantity of disorder that is there, and tending to grow through entropy.
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- 4,000,000,000 years ago organisms learned to cull useful bits out of the cosmic noise. Early bacteria evolved mechanisms to protect the important information contained in their genetic code from the depredations of heat and noise and ,in reproducing, pass that information to their descendants.
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- I hope my kids can survive on the few bits of nonrandom ness I gave them in my genetic code.
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- There is so much nonscientific information purporting to be science that politicians have no problem finding “scientific” support for what they want to do. Before we drown in our informational effluent we need to learn how to pull the true gems from the garbage.
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- There are bits like thou shall not kill that should not be lost. We need to pay attention to science when science has something true to tell us. To prevent the teaching of myths as scientific fact and to avoid potential ecological disasters, we need leaders who can tell gems from rubbish.
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- The fraction of information that is truly useful is small and getting smaller. We need to get better at recognizing it.
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- All information in a computer and on the internet boils down to being either a 1 or a 0. Ones and zeros travel through the internet in packets ranging from 10 to 1000 bytes in size. A byte is a word in digital language. A bit is one character, either a 1 or a 0.
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- Each packet carries an address that a router, another computer, uses to send the packet to the next computer. Each packet gets stored in a computer’s memory for some period of time.
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- It is the pattern of bits that contains the information being sent. Just like it is the modulation on a radio wave that carries the information. The photon’s travel at the speed of light, 186,282 miles per second, but, the modulation being carried by the photons may be a voice of only 3,000 cycles per second.
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- The thing that “remembers” if a bit is a one or a zero is a capacitor inside each computer memory. It is a small chip capable of holding a small amount of electrical charge. If it is charged up it is a one. If it is uncharged it is a zero. Each capacitor only requires about 40,000 individual electrons to charge up.
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- A typical e-mail like this Review contains about 50,000 bytes of information. Each byte contains 8 bits. So, a typical e-mail is 409,600 bits and about one-half of those bits will be ones and one-half will be zeros.
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- So, that is 204,800 ones that are stored on capacitors. Each capacitor requires 4*10^4 electrons, times 2.048*10^5 = 8*10^9 electrons. Each electron weighs 2*10^-30 pounds. Therefore, each typical e-mail weighs 16*10^-21 pounds.
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- The total internet traffic is 4*10^16 bytes per hour. Video files are 59% of the traffic, music files are 33%, and e-mails only 9%.
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- Electricity reached 25% of Americans in 46 years. Telephones reached 25% in35 years. Televisions reached 25% in 26 years. The Internet has done it in 6 years.
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- YouTube alone today consumes as much bandwidth as the entire internet did in the year 2000.
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- The total weight of the internet information is 4*10^16 bytes /5*10^4 bytes/e-mail*16*10^-21 pounds/e-mail = 1.28*10^-8 pounds.
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- The weight of the total world-wide internet information is 1.28*10^-8 pounds, or, about equal to the tiniest grain of sand, one measuring .002 of an inch across.
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- Words and pictures are powerful but they are not heavy. Of course, this does not include the weight of all the computers, fiber, radio links, and wires that are the highways for all these ones and zeros. That would be a very heavy calculation.
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- If a book is 10,000 words and the internet traffic is 10*10^15 bytes then that is equivalent to 40,000,000,000 books on the internet at one time. 40 trillion books, Amazing.
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- The Library of Congress has 29,000,000 books and 57,000,000 manuscripts. The internet is 1000 times larger.
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- The Internet handles 1.074*10^18 bytes every hour, according to the Washington Post. That is 1000 times more than the 4*10^16 bytes per hour that I was using.
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- Hopefully this is enough information for you to digest? Or, is it too much information?
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- July 21, 2019 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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--------------------- Sunday, July 21, 2019 --------------------
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