Grrr, I should have been more specific. Everything on the internet is made up of little electrical signals (0's and 1's). These signals need to be charged by electrons, around 40,000 per bit. Since electrons have weight, we can 'guess' the entire weight. One researcher estimated 40 petabytes (40 x 10^15 bytes), so if we assume that, on average, half the bits are 1's (which require charge), then the total weight is 0.2 millionths of an ounce. Better?
As for the bananas, about one in every 8550 potassium atoms is radioactive potassium-40 and since bananas happen to be particularly high in potassium, it'sone of the most radioactive foods.
Found these in DISCOVER magazine by the way.
Ah that makes a lot more sense, that's actually a really cool fact. It's the future of our digital storage; however the electron push, the energy required to sustain information in the form of subatomic particles is too high (currently) to be used in a stable form. But I never imagined it would be something so small
I stand corrected.
As for the banana fact (which I never said was wrong by the way), I think its interesting, but you'd probably get messed up a lot sooner from other trace materials if you ate that many bananas
Oh, and I just remembered a cool (useless) fact. The largest number ever used in a proof (for a combinatorial mathematics riddle) is Graham's Number. I'll first describe its ridiculousness as to awe you with the mind-boggling size of this number before I tell you what it actually is.
Graham's number is so big that if you took a googolplex (10^10^100) to the power of a googolplex a googolplex number of times, you wouldn't even get close to the size of this number. It's so big that a seperate notation had to be
created simply to express the number. In fact, it is physically
impossible to write out this number using exponential notation simply because there is not enough matter in the universe (about 10^60 particles) to have it written out.
First I'll explain the new notation, called Knuth's Up-Arrows.
3^^^3 = 3^^(3^3) = 3^^27 = 3^(3^27)^(3^27)...^(3^27) where "..." represents a total of 27 ^(3^27).
The rate of increase using Knuth's Up-Arrows is stupidly fast. If you didn't understand what happened there, in simpler terms its kinda like
7+7 = 7*2
7*7 = 7^2
where Knuth's Up-Arrows represent the next factor of rapid increasing notation from exponential form.
So Graham's Number is:
3^^^...^^^3 with 64th iteration of Knuth's Up-Arrows where 3^^^^3 is the first iteration.
In otherwords (let G=graham's #)
G=3(63rd iteration # of arrows)3
63rd iteration = 3(62nd iteration # of arrows)3
all the way down to 1st iteration = 3^^^^3
Simplifying the second iteration would require all the processing power on Earth over a million years to produce. Simplifying the third iteration is physically impossible.
