... what IT does to you ...
June 19, 1999
4:39 p.m.
Statistics are fascinating, aren't they? Take, for example, the fact that the world is said to process something like 3.4 billion e-mail messages a day. Yes, that's a B. And that's a heck of a lot of data, even when you figure that at least half of every message is filled with clipped quotations from previous messages. So, how big is 3.4 billion? Hang with me. It does eventually get around to writing somewhere down the line. Well ... let's say we multiply 3.4 billion by 365 days a year, and get 1.241 trillion. Now, this sounds pretty big, eh? But, to the best of my knowledge, this is really only about the size of the annual Federal government budget in good old US dollars. Another way of saying this is that the US government is spending roughly a dollar for every e-mail that is sent around the globe, so do you really need to forward that joke page to seventy-five people? There are starving people in Africa, you know? Or, let's say the Earth is 93 million miles from the sun--a fair average, as I remember (I'm walking a tightrope here, working without reference material). If a ship could travel one mile for every e-mail sent in a single day, it would travel to and from the sun 18 times (3.4 billion/93 million, rounded). Of course, they would only be traveling at about 20% the speed of light. Another way of looking at this is that if we could regulate a spacecraft's velocity by our rate of e-mail generation, we woul have to up our rate to something ove 16 billion a day . . . so forward everything you get to an extra five people, and we're there. Of course, then the government will go broke--or taxes will rise, whichever. Or we can say that the average first novel advance is $5,000 and takes about three years to pay out. Errr ... Okay, let's not go down that path. So, let's say I sit at my desk writing for two and a half hours a day, which works out to about 9,000 seconds. Assuming I write every day (which is a fair assumption in that I make up hours lost by writing weekends), that works out to something under 3.3 million seconds a year spent in from of my computer. So, if I could generate an e-mail a second, I would have to write for 1,035 years in order to equal the entire world's current output in the average day. I doubt even L. Ron Hubbard would be up to that task. The good news, of course, is that no one has to do that. We just have to get our 500 or a thousand or whatever, words per day, and leave the huge numbers to the statisticians.   One way writers will be able to use tech to protect themselves. Have a good one. See ya after Father's Day.  Daily Persistence is © Ron Collins |
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"If I'm capable of working smarter, then why do I work here?" punchline to a Dilbert |
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