In The Palm Of My Hand

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That thing in the palm of my hand is a micro SD card. They’re used in cellphones, tablets and some cameras. This particular one stores 32GB of anything that can be turned into bits.

Oh… and 32GB is not 32,000,000,000 bytes. It’s actually 34,359,738,368 bytes. Math! It’s 8-bit binary, not decimal.

Do you really want to know?

Anyway, the astounding thing is there’s 32 billion of anything that small. Not only that, they’re 32 billion really fast, really well organized bytes.

To me, this part of science is no different than magic. I’ve studied semiconductors and chips a bunch of times and always get lost before I truly understand. How can inanimate manufactured wafers of silicon do that?

A card like the one in my hand can store nearly four Wikipedias or more than three hours of high quality HD video.

To paraphrase, “So how much would you pay for a little chip that stores all the world’s information and then some?” $500? $200? $100?

Chips like mine now sell for $20-$25.

It’s cheap technology like this which will usher in the next era of digital change. Why ever throw anything away?

2 thoughts on “In The Palm Of My Hand”

  1. We will all have these types of devices embedded within our physical bodies. Eventually technology at this highly-developed level will support and even replace our organs and nervous systems. How could our future unfold any differently? Humans have always integrated with new technology in a way that is both wonderfully mysterious and disturbingly threatening. Great stuff, this life and death thing.

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