fuckphilosophy.com

I shave my head pretty close – every couple of days. I was walking home the other day, and a car drove by. The window was down and the person in the passenger seat said in a pretty low voice, almost under his breath, as they passed by me (so that I wasn’t even able to see them): Where’s your hair? I thought it was really funny then, and I am still laughing about it tonight. I don’t really know why it was so funny – that is what I will try to figure out here.

I was thinking that maybe it would kinda be like seeing someone walk down the street otherwise fully clothed and accessorized, but without any pants on. No, no, forget that, I don’t know what I was thinking. It would be more like passing some ordinary stranger walking down the road, someone with a home and kid and job or something, and with something like mockish snideness (said almost to yourself or whoever you are with, but so the person could possibly hear you or might interpret it as not meant to be heard clearly) say something like: Where’s your ghettoblaster? Something really incongruous like that. (I was trying to think of something that people without cars carry around to make themselves seem badass.) I guess it could also have just been a really stupid joke – like seeing a blind person and, in that same manner, saying (with a snicker): Where’s your vision? Otherwise, I guess it was funny that they didn’t just yell “hey faggot!” or something. They actually did a little bit of research; they dug up something in the couple of seconds that they had to prepare.

Whatever. You may ask: why the hell would someone think about some stupid nonsense as someone saying “where’s your hair?”, let alone write about it and think someone might think it was funny or interesting? When reflecting gets to that point, it isn’t fun any longer.

Remember the good ol’ days, back before when train conductors starting sending text messages? What a bunch of little girls those train conductors have become. Am I right? I’m preaching to the chorus, I know. Next thing ya know  they’ll be dressing their online pony friends, and hanging out in chat rooms for ponies. But this post isn’t really about what a bunch of sissies these train conductors have become. No, this is fuckphilosophy.com, and here we are concerned with the principles behind the matter. While I’m happy that there will be no more train wrecks because of text messaging, I think there were some other options that may not have been considered apart from just banning train conductors from text messaging.  Here are some: they could’ve just put a cell phone scrambling device in the conductor’s lair. Whatever, that one was stupid, but there are tons of possibilities. The most compassionate and all-around win-win of all the possibilities was that they could require that train conductors get certified to send text messages with their eyes closed. Or some other incentives like for every text message they don’t send on their shift, maybe they get an extra five dollars or something. That might not work, because you could just make up some number of text messages that you really wanted to send, but refrained from. You could also reward train conductors who catch other train conductors who are about to send text messages. That might work. Or they could just hire someone to stand there and watch to make sure no one sends text messages. Anyways, you see that there are lots of great options out there besides just banning train conductors from texting.

The new CERN nuclear accelerator is almost ready to turn on. In one year it will produce enough data to fill a 20 km high tall stack of CR-Rs. One CD-R is about 1.2mm thick. That is about 16,666,666.66 CD-Rs (or about 2,519,379.845 DVD-Rs). We’re gonna fuckin’ figure out this universe in no time! Just think about all that data!

I learned here that in 2006 there was enough digital data on the planet to fill 12 separate stacks of novels, each 93 million miles tall (to the Sun), and by 2010 12 stacks from the Sun to Pluto and back.

I can’t find any website where I can convert novels (in bytes) into CD-Rs, so I don’t exactly know how to compare these figures.

In this post from 2004, this man says that the Internet has less than half of 460 terabytes.

Unless my calculations are all fucked up, that 16,666,666.67 CD-Rs is about 10,579 terabytes.

That makes the data from one year of CERN use to come out to about 46 internets (2004-internets).

In this post from 2005, the Internet is 5 million terabytes. In this article from sometime in 2008, it says the CEO of Google said that the Internet is 500 million terabytes big.

That comes out to 47,263 years of CERN data.

The bottom line: The Universe better get a whole lot more interesting REALLY fucking fast if it is going to compete with the Internet.