Monday
Adventure:
A little VR boxing to start things off right! Calling this section adventure instead of just VR adventure show I can show off the awesome stuff I get to work on, that I’m allowed to talk about 😉.
Today’s Awesome:
I heard of a wild cool technology to store digital information in the future, and it was just so cool. I’ll save that specific one for last, but first, why does it matter?
Well, for one thing, good storage can get you out of the Dark Ages, as any good monk copying books will tell you. And currently, it could save us just a ton of energy to find great compression and economical storage. Really makes all of digital lives (and our lives are very digital in some places, for better or worse), that much more economical, and more importantly, sustainable.
For Your Consideration:
Tuesday
Today’s Awesome:
Here is a really cool little history of data storage.
I did not know this about punch cards:
Punch cards were used to communicate information to equipment “before” computers were developed. The punched holes originally represented a “sequence of instructions” for pieces of equipment, such as textile looms and player pianos. The holes acted as on/off switches. Basile Bouchon developed the punch card as a control for looms in 1725.
Then came magnetic storage.
Magnetic tape was first patented in 1928, by Fritz Pfleumer. (Cassette tapes were often used for homemade “personal computers,” in the 1970s and 80s.) In 1965, Mohawk Data Sciences offered a magnetic tape encoder, described as a punch card replacement. By 1990, the combination of affordable personal computers and “magnetic disk storage” had made punch cards nearly obsolete.
The rest covers “Random Access Memory” RAM, floppy disks, CDs, flash, solid state and ends with cloud storage. Now on to the cool stuff.
For Your Consideration:
Wednesday
Today’s Awesome:
Before we move on from history, a pretty cool timeline. Shoutout to the movie “Twister” as an example of a DVD.
For Your Consideration:
Thursday
Adventure:
I got to work more on this project! Hoping to take the 3D file of a room I generate and exporting a simple, 2D floor plan for easy use.
Today’s Awesome:
On more recent innovation, we’ve got “5D” storage, etching things into glass.
Researchers have created "5D" data storage technology that could allow 500 terabytes of data to be written to a CD-sized glass disc.
For Your Consideration:
Friday
Today’s Awesome:
There is just so so much need for long-term storage. Like, stuff you don’t need to constantly access, but which you want a back up of. Here, for instance, is Microsoft’s Project Silica.
Right now, hard drives need to transfer to other hard drives every five years or so, to prevent degradation. With the current efforts like Project Silica, it could last 1,000 years!
For Your Consideration:
Saturday
Adventure:
Today’s Awesome:
Overall, the size of computer storage available to people has been dramatically expanding.
It took 51 years before hard disk drives reached the size of 1TB (terabyte, i.e. 1,000GB). This happened in 2007. In 2009, the first hard drive with 2 TB of storage arrived. So while it took 51 years to reach the first terabyte, it took just two years to reach the second.
Fast forward 10 years, and in 2019 the largest commercially available HDDs can store at least 15TB of data. The world of SSDs offers even more space of at least 100TB.
For Your Consideration:
Sunday
Adventure:
Today’s Awesome:
Finally, the promised wild future: storing data in DNA.
Many scientists believe that an alternative solution lies in the molecule that contains our genetic information: DNA, which evolved to store massive quantities of information at very high density. A coffee mug full of DNA could theoretically store all of the world’s data, says Mark Bathe, an MIT professor of biological engineering.
That’s all the video of YouTube, Netflix, Facebook, TikTok, and more. All. The. Data.
For Your Consideration:
Bonus!!!
Fitness Outro:
Okay, here is how we did weight and food:
Days under Weight Watcher food point target: 4/7. Not the best.
And the weight? 191.0, 190.3, 189.2, 189.2, 188.6, 190.8, 192.0 for Monday through Sunday. As you can see, I made a round trip. Dipped down nice and steady till the middle of the week, and then over the weekend, jumped right back up. Bleh.
Well, we try again folks. Even if I do a swing down and up again, I want to see if I can get a little lower each week. Thanks y’all!