Lecture Diary:

What is my current data size? I have probably about 10 gigabytes of photos and similar amounts of downloaded music. One thing, though it is embarrassing to admit, that I was unaware of was the environmental impact of this is that, with the increasing ease of access to hard drives and iCloud storage, things like photos become impossible to delete. When it comes to data, there is a true hoarding culture. For instance, 10 gigabytes of photos is probably equivalent to 15,000; just think of how ridiculous it would be if I had those as physical copies fifty years ago. Finding out about the methods people once used to store data was interesting. For instance, we learned about tally sticks, which were used to carve information. Evidence of this practice dates back more than 30,000 years, and it only really stopped about 100 years ago—this is insane!

What’s the impact of lots of data?

• The carbon footprint of spam:
• 0.3g CO2e: A spam email
• 4g CO2e: A proper email
• 50g CO2e: An email with long and tiresome attachment




• The Inca Empire spawned a vast bureaucracy sending and
receiving information, from tax records to census data. Much of it traveled via the quipu, an assembly of knotted, colored cords encoding the data.

• Quipucamayu (quipu makers), specialists responsible for encoding and decoding the information, were the scribes of their day.




The 701 was IBM’s first commercial digital electronic computer. Its unreliable Williams-Kilburn tube memory caused an average time-to-failure of about 15 minutes.