#523 Real Illusion

I was reading a series of articles the other day on nothing.
Discover magazine published a special issue on it.
The invisible stuff we live with everyday and never pay attention to, but which permeates our lives, perhaps inflicting all sorts of unknown mayhem.
It’s like the villagers of Chernobyl—in this case what we don’t know can hurt us.
One article was about how much the internet weighs. How much do all those electrons weigh on our hard drives, this massive edifice of information, with petaflops of data manipulated every day?
Despite the sound, petaflops are not poodle paddies, by the way, or even horse apples. A petaflops (sic) is a thousand million floating operation points per second.
Most of the traffic on the internet is file sharing, 75% in fact.
Naturally it’s all legal.
All daily data traffic amounts to 40 petabytes.
Again, petabytes are not what you sustain from a rabid shih-tzu.
A petabyte is a 1 followed by 16 zeros. 40 of them in data every day. If every bit of energy represented as a one or a zero on your computer was weighed—40 petabytes of data worth—it would weigh 0.2 millionths of an ounce.
So at least the weight of the vehicles speeding by on internet superhighway isn’t a problem.
Of course, all the toxins in all the non-recycled computers piling up in the landfills to the side of the road still are.
And speaking of those computers, many of us now have eschewed the desktop, plugged-into-the-outlet, PC, with the hard cable modem attached to our wall and our monthly bill payment.
We have instead opted for a laptop with a WiFi card and roam the coffee shops and neighborhoods looking to internet for free.
All well and good and more power to you.
Except it may be too much power to you.
As in your brain.
Like, this is your brain...this is your brain on WiFi.
Turns out WiFi broadcasts and receives at 2.45 gigahertz. Almost exactly the same frequency as your microwave.
Interesting. Perhaps that’s why whenever I’m at the WiFi coffee shop I think of popcorn...
Maybe my brain’s trying to tell me something.
It’s probably nothing.
I hate it when those negative ideas pop into my head.
America ya gotta love it