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.
-- xenzag, Jan 09 2011

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]

Sorry [Xenzag], that is not part of the British Library any more, more’s the pity.

This idea should be called “wigipedia”. A networked comb could erase and re-write updated entries each morning as you groom.
-- pocmloc, Jan 09 2011


If all the wigs were joined together would that be a Hair Net ?

<shuffles off, shamefaced>
-- 8th of 7, Jan 09 2011


That's excellent!
If you are ever stumped for an answer you can just mullet over.
-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Jan 09 2011


If you cut out all the irrelevant stuff, you'd presumably be left with the bald facts.
-- 8th of 7, Jan 09 2011


You were just dyeing to say that, weren't you ?
-- 8th of 7, Jan 09 2011


Numbers numbers numbers.

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.

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.

So, you're going to need about 10^21 square µms of hair surface.

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.

The average human head has about 10^5 hairs. So, you're going to need just under 10^8 people.

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.

*Clearly, the Welsh and Scots can be counted as honorary English for now.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jan 09 2011


//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?

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.
-- mouseposture, Jan 09 2011


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.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jan 09 2011


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.

Estimates of the number of published books centre on about 100 million, which would occupy 2,000 heads.

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).

So, we're up to 200,000 heads.

Then there's movies. And stuff.

I think a few tens of millions of heads isn't that far out. But we might manage without the Scots and the Welsh.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jan 09 2011


Do you mean "implies"?
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jan 09 2011


//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.

//Do you mean "implies// I infer that you understood the *rest* of what he wrote?

(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?)
-- mouseposture, Jan 09 2011


// Picasso wasn't all that accurate, for instance// That depends on what you mean by being accurate.
-- xenzag, Jan 09 2011


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.

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.
-- Jinbish, Jan 09 2011



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