And I'm Still Working on Milli...and Mega...
In Patrick Di Justo's opening words: "From trillion-flop game consoles to trillion-dollar tax cuts, the significant digits of our lives are now followed by 12 zeros. The whole world is tera-flying." He offers a guide to understanding meanings of "tera" in four different contexts.
ONE TERABYTE =
- 1,537,752 books
- 333 copies of the human genome
- 185 Wikipedias
- 127,455 MP3s of Free Bird
- 12 hi-def copies of The Lord of the Rings trilogy
ONE TERAWATT =
- 714,285,714 clothes irons' electricity requirement
- 13,333,333,333 laptops' electricity requirement
- 20,000,000 radio stations' transmitter power
- 83.3 x estimated peak electricity demand for NYC
- 100 x US wind-power generation capacity
ONE TERADOLLAR =
- 45,095,828 Toyoto Priuses
- 8% of the U.S. GDP
- 31.3 x endowment of Gates Fouyndation
- 3,265,220 new American homes
- 1 x estimated cost of the Iraq War
ONE TERAFLOP =
- 100,000 486 PC's
- 0.56 Playstation 3
- 5000 iPods
- 287 Pentium 4's
- 10,000 Cray-1s
- 1 Xbox 360
Your Task: Make up some of your own comparisons.....how about a Tera of them by next Monday.
Source: Patrick Di Justo's "Tera! Tera! Tera!" Wired, March 2007, p. 54
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