Liam ProvenAug 5, 2023

Get a sense of scale for computer storage...

Byte of data: a grain of rice
Kilobyte: a cup of rice
Megabyte: 8 bags of rice
Gigabyte: 3 container lorries
Terabyte: 2 container ships
Petabyte: covers Manhattan
Exabyte: covers the UK (3 times)
Zettabyte: fills the Pacific Ocean

Original source of the comparison, for the record: https://www.slideshare.net/dwellman/what-is-big-data-24401517

What is big data?

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Show threadSylvia Wenmackers 🦉🍀Aug 5, 2023
@lproven You could also illustrate it with "height of columns of rice on one field of a chess board". The chess board was made by Dutch science teacher Arjan van der Meij https://www.instructables.com/Chess-Board-Full-of-Rice-Exponential-Growth/ I just added the labels after seeing your post.
It shows that, if each byte had the size of a grain of rice, any amount of data beyond an exabyte corresponds to a column of rice that extends in space beyond the farthest removed human-made object (Voyager).
Chess Board With Rice: Exponential Growth

Chess Board With Rice: Exponential Growth: It was probably my math teacher who introduced us in High School to exponential growth by telling us the story of the invention of the game of chess. The king (emperor whatever) who had ordered a new game because of the fact that he was bored by the…

Instructables
Show threadLiam Proven

@SylviaFysica Maybe it's just me, but they don't help. It's like the post downthread about counting bibles.

Soon, you're just talking about piles of books -- or rice-grains -- to the moon.

Not real, not useful, can't be imagined by most people.

I can't picture vast very narrow columns of arbitrary height & I have no instinctive feel for the distance to the moon.

But a truck of rice versus the Pacific Ocean is something concrete I can grab hold of.

Aug 7, 2023 at 10:29amWeb
Show threadSylvia Wenmackers 🦉🍀Aug 7, 2023
@lproven Well, it's a reference to an old legend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambalappuzha_Sree_Krishna_Swamy_Temple#Legend
and the moon example specifically gives a nice twist on another stock example of exponential growth: paper folding. To me, both the rice on the chess board and the paper folding to the moon are more about wonder than practical ways of thinking.
Ambalappuzha Sree Krishna Swamy Temple - Wikipedia

Show threadLiam ProvenAug 8, 2023
@SylviaFysica Yes, I know, I spotted that. 🙂
Show threadPatrick Johanneson 🚀 🇨🇦Sep 30, 2023
@lproven @SylviaFysica The one that always works for me—at least if we're comparing "million" to "billion"—is that a million seconds is about 11½ days, and a billion seconds is a bit more than 32 years.