Our world is all about information. People are constantly measuring and observing. We measure the height of snow or the size of sunspots. We track giraffe herds or subway riders. We count customers or concert tickets or cheeseburgers. Then we collect those facts into groups called data.
It’s a lot of data. Every day about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created. How much is that? Let’s say you buy the latest Star Wars movie on a Blu-ray (high-definition) disc. When the movie’s picture and sound files were stored on that disc, they became 25 gigabytes of data. So one Blu-ray movie equals 25,000,000,000 bytes. That already sounds like a lot of data. But you’d need 10 million Blu-ray movie discs to add up to 2.5 quintillion bytes. If you…
You're reading a preview of
Muse: The Magazine Of Science, Culture, And Smart Laughs For Kids And Children (Digital) - 1 Issue, November/December 2018