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Now that it is possible to print the periodic table on a section of a human hair, (link one) there is an opportunity to create The Wigs of All Human Knowledge.
These could take the form of an individual extension, which might just deal with a specific sub-topic, like every detective novel that was
ever written, while a tall bouffant style (see second link) would seem to be more than ample to contain the entire mathematical world of the last 2,000 years.
Single strands of hair that could contain the complete works of Charles Dickens, for example, might be carried around on little spools, suitable for reading using something like a microfiche enlarger.
Periodic table on a human hair
http://derrenbrown....printed-human-hair/
[xenzag, Jan 09 2011]
The world of mathematics Bouffant
http://www.caufield...mages/70_657346.jpg
Transylvania Bride Wig style [xenzag, Jan 09 2011]
Contents of British Museum Library
http://www.caufield...per-Huge-Black.html
[xenzag, Jan 09 2011]
Small section of British Library....
http://upload.wikim...ection_Feb_2006.jpg
....now available as an afro-wig [xenzag, Jan 09 2011]
See You Jimmy
http://www.google.c...q=see+you+jimmy+hat
A weighty-tome, in library terms. [Jinbish, Jan 09 2011]
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Annotation:
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Sorry [Xenzag], that is not part of the British Library any more, more’s the pity. |
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This idea should be called “wigipedia”. A networked comb could erase and re-write updated entries each morning as you groom. |
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If all the wigs were joined together would that be a Hair Net ? |
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<shuffles off, shamefaced> |
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That's excellent!
If you are ever stumped for an answer you can just mullet over. |
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If you cut out all the irrelevant stuff, you'd presumably be left with the bald facts. |
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You were just dyeing to say that, weren't you ? |
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According to a reliable Internet, the contents of the
Internet amount to something like 10 exabytes. It's
probably reasonable to assume that the sum of all human
knowledge is on the web, so 10 exabytes should do it. |
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On the video, they put the periodic table (abbreviations of
about 100 element names) on a 100µm x 100µm rectangle.
Assuming 1 byte per letter, and ignoring the fact that
some elements have single-letter names, that's about 200
bytes in 10^4 square µms, or about 50 square µms per
byte. Given the fuzziness of the writing, I don't think you
could go significantly lower than that on hair. |
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So, you're going to need about 10^21 square µms of hair
surface. |
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The diameter of a human hair is about 100µm and, if we
assume a typical hair is 20cm long, that gives you about
10^8 square µms per hair. So, you'll need about 10^13
human hairs. |
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The average human head has about 10^5 hairs. So, you're
going to need just under 10^8 people. |
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Basically, what we're saying here is that the sum of human
knowledge can be carried by the heads of the English*, as
we have always known. |
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*Clearly, the Welsh and Scots can be counted as honorary
English for now. |
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//It's probably reasonable to assume that the sum of all
human knowledge is on the web// See, here's where the
pseudo-XML [Ian Tindale] condemns would come in handy.
In what tone of voice, exactly, was that statement
uttered? |
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Anyway, the total entropy of the Internet is considerably
less than the 10 exabyte figure, due to redundancy;
moreover, the mutual entropy between Internet and
Human Knowledge is less than the Internet's own entropy,
due to the large amount of falsity on the Internet; it's
also less than the sum of human knowledge, due to the
fact that the Vatican Library hasn't been fully scanned yet. |
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Thing is, [mousey], if you're going to start weeding stuff out
on the grounds of redundancy and lack of factual accuracy,
then bang goes most of human knowledge. Picasso wasn't all
that accurate, for instance. |
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If you prefer to think of it in books, you'd get about
120,000 characters per hair, which is maybe 70 pages. So, a
human head (100,000 hairs) is going to hold about 7 million
pages of text, or say 50,000 books. |
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Estimates of the number of published books centre on
about 100 million, which would occupy 2,000 heads. |
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However, this completely disregards all images, which I am
pretty sure would be 100 fold greater in data terms. (Why?
I'm guessing there is one page-sized image for every ten
pages of text, in the world; at a decent resolution, that
page is going to occupy 1Mb, as compared to a page of text
at about 1kb). |
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So, we're up to 200,000 heads. |
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Then there's movies. And stuff. |
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I think a few tens of millions of heads isn't that far out.
But we might manage without the Scots and the Welsh. |
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//bang goes most of human knowledge// bang goes most
of *something,* yeah. Not sure if _Demoiselles d'Avignon_
counts as "knowledge." Still less willing to accord that
status to outright falsehoods. |
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//Do you mean "implies// I infer that you understood the
*rest* of what he wrote? |
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(PS: Picasso was, arguably, *more* accurate than, say,
photography. Wasn't cubism an attempt to represent
objects more faithfully than a conventional painting,
limited to a single point of view, could do?) |
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// Picasso wasn't all that accurate, for instance// That depends on what you mean by being accurate. |
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I'm more of the opinion that the Internet should not be used as the source of "All Human Knowledge". While useful for a numerical stab at the amount of information, I'd rather veer towards more 'permanent' sources. I'm not criticising the Interweb, per se, it's just that it's ephemeral and a bit hairy-fairy. |
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Actually... maybe there is a way of grading the information:
Learned journals and classic texts- Court dress, horsehair legal wigs.
Newspapers - toupées
Websites - "See-You-Jimmy" hats. |
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