itsablog

a riddle for math/science undergrads
last modified: Tuesday, November 28, 2006 (8:43:25 PM)
Not to blog twice in one day, but I couldn't pass this up:

Someone who apparently managed to get a masters in creative computeering from a university in India declared recently that he found a way to store 450GB of information on a sheet of paper by using a system of shapes and colors instead of numbers. The paper is printed with a special printer that is roughly the size of a laptop and does not cost a billion dollars.

http://computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&;articleId=9005393

(The URL code is screwed up... remove the ; from the URL.)

Your question of the day is -- without reading the articles debunking this claim -- what is wrong with this picture (no pun intended)? I'd give a prize for this, but it's too easy to cheat, unfortunately.

(I say "undergrads" because anyone who has finished a math, engineering, or comp sci degree yet does not instantly see the fallacy here should check the batteries on their BS detector. It's not an easy question without knowledge of the basic underlying math, but it's dead simple with it.)

To his credit, the author of this claim is either insane, a complete idiot, or a comic genius. I can't figure out which...
re: a riddle for math/science undergradsTuesday, November 28, 2006 - 9:09:56 PM
ZombieBunny

I guess this wouldn''t apply to me but.....I have no clue. Eh heh. If that is true, that is something very amazing. Since I''m not studing math or anything of that nature, I am clueless.

Cool little story though. :)


re: a riddle for math/science undergradsTuesday, December 05, 2006 - 3:16:38 PM
huckapucka

"To make the atomic argument, assuming that the spacing between atoms is 0.3nm, and if you could treat each individual atom as a bit, there are:

3e-7 mm per atom, so
3e6 atoms per mm, or
7.5e7 atoms per inch, and
5.8e15 atoms per square inch, so
5.4e17 atoms (and potential bits) on the surface of the page

To store 250 GB (as apparently was originally claimed) means that each bit corresponds to creating/measuring the presence or absence of about 27,000 atoms, which is a pretty small amount of ink...

Therefore, you don''t need a printer, you need a scanning tunneling microscope..."

Yeah - I cheated.
Did I win?