0109 Sunday (M) DONE
I know. I know. When we were kids, we walked eight miles to school in the driving snow, uphill, both ways. Oh, the things we did to learn.
But the thing of it is, this isn’t far from the truth. For the first 35 years of my life, information was hard to come by. If we wanted to know how tall a giraffe was, we had to work for it. The same thing goes for how many cups are in a gallon.
We all know this has changed immensely. All we have to do is to open our phones or computers and visit our good friend Google.
A few words about that entity. The “Google Search Index” contains more than 100,000,000 GB. That is a lot. And, it is the world’s biggest search engine which includes hundreds of billions of web pages. But people these days don’t seem to be searching for Newton’s first law of motion. No instead, the top five trending Google searches for 2021 were:
NBA
DMX
Gabby Petito
Kyle Rittenhouse
Brian Laundrie
But my how things have changed. In 1973, when I was spending my early days in the library, a total of 43 computers were connected to the internet. Today, there are 5.1 billion people who use the internet daily. Considering there are 7.7 billion of us meandering on the big blue ball, that’s over 65% of us using the Worldwide Webber.
But more of us are connected than others. In Denmark, Iceland, the UAE, Kuwait, and Qatar, 99% of the people have the internet. As we might expect, North Korea ranks last for the number of internet users. According to a survey, the internet penetration rate is 0% in that sad, sad country. Next to last is Eritrea, with 8% internet penetration. Wouldn’t you know? I had to use Google to find out that Eritrea is a northeast African country on the Red Sea coast.
Our computers have come a long way too. The first computer weighed more than 27 tons. Her name was ENIAC, and she took up a modest 1800 square feet of space. I am not sure why she was a girl. I hope they didn’t assign the gender, based on her girth.
Much of our world has become vaporous because of technology. Take this. About 90% of the world’s currency only exists on computers. That means a measly 10% is actually cash. This smells like trouble to me.
If it seems like I’m worried about this, it is for good reason. Hackers write about 6,000 new viruses each month. High crime. And about 70% of virus engineers work for organized crime syndicates.
It might be a good idea to keep an eye on things, as such. In a way, we already do. People blink less when they use computers. The average person blinks about 20 times a minute under normal circumstances. But when we are in front of our screens, we only blink about seven times a minute.
Blame it on Babbage. Between 1833 and 1871, Charles Babbage invented all the parts that are now used for the modern computer. Even though it was the first computer invented, it really isn’t what we would consider a computer today.
But. It all comes back to this. At one of the schools he attended, Babbage was allowed access to a library that spurred on his love of math. Which led him to invent that first computer. Little did he know that invention would largely do away with the library as the main source for gathering information.
And he, too, walked a long way to school. Uphill. Both ways.
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“I know there’s a proverb which that says ‘To err is human,’ but a human error is nothing to what a computer can do if it tries.”
― Agatha Christie, Hallowe’en Party
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“Those who can imagine anything, can create the impossible.”
― Alan Turing
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“Computers don’t kill books; people do.”
― Douglas Rushkoff
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Our search for the meaning sometimes brings 404 page not found.
