A lot of people seem to be discussing this post speculating about how much storage space would be required to store every word spoken by every human being who has ever lived.

Apparently the standard answer repeated in a number of publications is that it can be done with a mere 5 exabytes. Mark Liberman points out that this is off by a factor of about 32 million. But Liberman’s calculations are also off due to an inaccurate assumption,

Second, the storage requirements for all human speech. There are said to have been 1 billion people in 1800, 1.6 billion people in 1900, and 6.1 billion people in 2000. So let’s assume that 10 billion people have lived an average of 50 years, speaking for 2 hours a day on average throughout their lives.

That is not a very good assumption for a number of reason. First, it assumes that the majority of human beings who have ever lived are alive today. Like the 5 exabyte claim, this is a commonly repeated myth.

Estimating the total number of human beings who have ever lived is obviously an inexact science, but the Population Reference Bureau estimates that the actual total is likely to be in excess of 100 billion. The problem is that people tend to think (as Liberman does) in terms of relatively recent history.

Homo sapiens probably goes back to about 50,000 BCE, but population doesn’t really take off until the agricultural revolution around 8,000 BCE. The Population Reference Bureau estimates that between 8,000 BCE and 1 AD, more than 46 billion human beings were born. From 1 AD to about 1200 AD, about another 26 billion people were born.

Another factor that would have to be included here, however, would be average life span — especially given infant and childhood mortality rates that are still high in some parts of the world. Fifty is probably a bit too high (it’s not that people didn’t live to be 50 in the 19th or 12th or even 1st century, but that so many people died before reaching their fifth birthday).

But suffice it to say that the total storage space is significantly higher than even Liberman’s estimates.

Source:

How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth? Carl Haub, Population Reference Bureau, November/December 2002.

PC Magazine’s Bill Howard has a short article about digital archiving of personal records, photographs, etc. The past few months I’ve been working on a personal project to digitize and get rid of as much physical material as I can.

It occurred to me back in August that today I spend about 60 to 70 percent of my waking hours on my laptop. When it comes to books, photographs, etc., for the most part if it isn’t on my laptop or external hard drive, it doesn’t exist.

The first thing I did was something that previously had been close to unimaginable — I got rid of most of my book collection. I’ve gone from about 1,500 books to about 150 books. For books that I really wanted to keep but hadn’t opened in awhile, I simply created high resolution scanned PDF copies with OCRed text so I can include them in searches with DTSearch.

Next, I used a sheet-fed scanner to convert tens of thousands of pages personal papers to high quality scans and then destroyed the physical copies. There were a few things like birth certificates that I really needed to have physical copies, but for most of this stuff it’s much more useful on my hard drive than in some box in my basement.

I’ve made a couple of attempts over the years to digitize all of my non-digital photographs, but I’ve just got too many to do on my own efficiently. In 2004 I’ll be paying someone else to digitize my images (despite what Howard claims in his article, if you do it in bulk you can get high -quality scans at significantly less than $1/frame).

One of the things that had me screaming in horror at Howard’s article was this tidbit about photographs,

You can help future generations by culling your digital photos now. If you can’t cut this year’s 2,500 digital images to 500, then create a 2003 Favorites folder and copy over your favorite 100 photos. A CD with those 100 photos makes a nice holiday gift for the in-laws. Make sure to annotate each picture, either in the filename or in the JPEG file information field: year, place, and people in the picture. Before culling, it’s probably best to make one full backup, in case you mess up and delete the photos you meant to save. Have I ever messed up like that? No comment.

Okay, I didn’t take 2,500 digital images in 2003 — it was more like 8,000 digital images. And the thought of deleting any of them is just ghastly, especially given how cheap storage is these days. Buy a decent photo management package like Photoshop Album 2.0 rather than permanently destroying information.

As far as analog video, I’m probably a bit extreme on this. I converted all of my analog video to DV and then imported the DV onto my laptop and then archived it on to several DVDs using RAR. I then converted all of the DV video to MPEG-2 movies then burned those to DVD-R. And then, just so I can have a local copy that is high quality but still clocks in at a decent size, I converted the MPEG-2 to DivX.

Bobble Beasts are bobble-head monster toys. Excellent! I especially love this Merv Pumpkinhead lookalike Bobble Beast.

This is something I have never understood about developers who write Windows programs and maybe someone out there has an answer — WTF are some software companies thinking when they create a program group in my Start menu that uses the company name rather than the product name.

For example, I am using CuteFTP Pro at moment for FTP but I can never find the g*****n program in my Start menu. Why? Because in their infinite wisdom, GlobalScape — the producers of CuteFTP Pro — decided that it would be much easier to find if they filed it under GlobalScape. Looking through my Start menu, about half the program groups use the product name and the other half use the company name. WTF?

Yes, I could alter this at installation or even go back and reorganize now, but why should I have to? What sort of people think that when I need to find CuteFTP Pro in a hurry that I’ll immediately think “Aha! Globalscape!”

The Chauvet cave paintings are, of course, famous as being the oldest cave paintings in the world — French archaeologists date them at 33,000 B.C.E.

But are they really that old?

According to this Telegraph article there’s actually some controversy over that. A couple British archaeologists argues that the French claim is off by about 18,000 years and that the French archaeologists were under intense political pressure to go with the earlier date in order to butress the “oldest cave paintings in the world” claim.

Who’s right? Don’t look at me — I don’t know. But the last paragraph of the story speaks volumes about how diligently the French tried to confirm the actual date of the cave paintings,

The French allowed only a single French laboratory to analyse the carbon in the charcoal used in the drawings and refused to send comparable samples to other facilities around the world for dating.

If that’s true, it seems kind of odd given the importance of establishing as closely as possible the true date of the cave paintings.

Source:

Britain and France in dispute over cave art. Philip Delves Broughton, Telegraph (London), October 16, 2003.

Mark Millar had an interesting column at ComicBookResources.Com a couple months ago about a fascinating might-have-been-movie — an Orson Welles-produced Batman film.

According to Millar, Welles began working in earnest with DC’s predecessor on a possible Batman film in 1946. Millar writes,

Gathering many of his old friends and colleagues together from “Citizen Kane,” he proposed “a cinematic experience, a kaleidoscope of heroism and nightmares and imagery seen nowhere save the subsconscious of Goya or even Hawksmoor itself.” Welles planned Batman to be an adult psycho-drama, but combined with what he described as the “heart-racing excitement of the Saturday morning serials, given a respectable twist and a whole new style of kinetic direction unlike anything ever attempted in American cinema.”

Welles, of course, would have played Batman/Bruce Wayne, and check out who Welles envisioned as co-stars: George Raft as Two-Face; James Cagney as The Riddler; Marlene Dietrich as Catwoman; and, finally, Basil Rathbone as The Joker.

Holy fanboy casting, Batman! That would have been the bomb. Somebody needs to pick up on that idea and do a “Shadow of the Vampire”-style look at what it might have been like.

Alas, it was not to be, as the studio system intervened to throw a wrench in the works. Rather than have Welles play Batman, the studio wanted him to play The Joker and have Gregory Peck (?!?!?!?) play Batman. That idea pissed off Welles who walked away and the project fell apart.

Ah, but what might have been. As Millar concludes his column,

This could have been his [Welles] masterpiece [uh, hasn't Millar seen "Citizen Kane"?] and, who knows, might have launched the superhero renaissance we’re undergoing at the moment with quality cast and directors two or three generations earlier. John Ford following up “The Bat-Man” with a “Captain America” movie? Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn as Clark Kent and Lois Lane [Cary Grant? *Gag* Try Gary Cooper as Superman]? In some weird parallel reality these things are DVDs collecting dust on our video-shelves and Clint Eastwood is wishing some studio would give his funny, old “Unforgiven” cowboy flick half a chance at the next pitch meeting.

And, best of all, no Ang Lee “Hulk” abomination.

Source:

Orson Welles and the Bat-Man. Mark Millar, ComicBookResources.Com, September 26, 2003.