You may already know the story. Google is a misspelling of the word ‘googol,’ which is an unimaginably large number. Specifically, it’s 10 raised to the 100th power. In time, maybe sooner than we think, Google will have to change its name, because its gathering of data on the internet will surpass a googol. How about googol squared, that is, 10 raised to the 200th power?
My friend, Patrick, often sends me great articles on business and leadership, and among these are about Big Data from McKinsey Quarterly. In time, I’m sure, a googol will actually be small data, because it is the point of these articles that Big Data will only become Bigger Data.
How big? This article from Business Insider helps us grasp how big, specifically by comparing it to traditional media and older technology. A time and a world, after which our children were born into.
 |
| (image credit) |
DVDs are gradually becoming passe, because of easy and direct downloads of videos and music to our devices. Still, it’s staggering to know that it would take 168 million of these little buggers to house the amount of information consumed on the internet. In one day.
It would take the US Postal Service two years to process our mail, if their collective mailbags brought in the number of e-mails that easily get bandied about in cyberspace. 294 billion. And the USPS is one of the best in the world, in my experience.
There was time when, well, Time was one news magazine of choice, along with Newsweek and US News & World Report. For me, it was better to digest my news once a week, than try to keep up with it on a daily basis. Just the two million blog posts in one day, authored by many more reporters than any of these publications can hire, would apparently keep Time humming for 770 years.
Finally, iPhone sales outpaces births in a given day: 378,000-to-371,000. I know it’s foolhardy even to imagine each of these babies holding an iPhone coming out of the womb. For, sadly, the majority of them, I’m sure, are born to impoverished circumstances. But imagine, nonetheless, if Apple can sustain this sales growth indefinitely, then in time there will be many more of these hotsellers floating around than there are people.
It’s mind-boggling, to say the least. But there we have it. Our capacity as humankind has accelerated in a geometric (i.e., exponential) progression.
It would take the US Postal Service two years to process our mail, if their collective mailbags brought in the number of e-mails that easily get bandied about in cyberspace. 294 billion. And the USPS is one of the best in the world, in my experience.
There was time when, well, Time was one news magazine of choice, along with Newsweek and US News & World Report. For me, it was better to digest my news once a week, than try to keep up with it on a daily basis. Just the two million blog posts in one day, authored by many more reporters than any of these publications can hire, would apparently keep Time humming for 770 years.
Finally, iPhone sales outpaces births in a given day: 378,000-to-371,000. I know it’s foolhardy even to imagine each of these babies holding an iPhone coming out of the womb. For, sadly, the majority of them, I’m sure, are born to impoverished circumstances. But imagine, nonetheless, if Apple can sustain this sales growth indefinitely, then in time there will be many more of these hotsellers floating around than there are people.
It’s mind-boggling, to say the least. But there we have it. Our capacity as humankind has accelerated in a geometric (i.e., exponential) progression.
Thank you for reading, and let me know what you think!
Ron Villejo, PhD
No comments:
Post a Comment