Google calculator is great fun. One of the things that it does that I have found invaluable is conversions; meaning, you can find the value of a pound in grams simply by typing “1lb in grams.” One that I thought of today, after encountering an article on Wikipedia about Moore’s Law was converting various unit measurements into the width of atoms. In the entry on Moore’s Law it is mentioned that IBM has recently engineered a process for printing circuitry that is only 29.9 nanometers in width. Elsewhere I discovered that an atom is roughly 130 picometers in width. ((Of course, when you get down to this level of specificity, atoms vary greatly in width, but this measure is fine for fun.)) So, if you want to know the width of these IBM printed circuits in atoms, you just type “29.9nm in pm” and you’ll get a result, 29,900, in picometers that you then divide by 130. So the new chip circuitry is roughly 230 atoms across! So how about your finger? Well, mine is roughly 150cm across, which, by my calculations is 1.15384615 × 10¹⁰ atoms across, or about 11 and a half quintillion atoms across. ((Anybody feel free to check my math or disagree with these results!)) And a quintillion in pennies is this much.

I’m not going to say too much about Sony BMG’s unbelievably stupid new business model—I’ll just leave it to Whatever’s excellent fictional focus group. Nuff said.

[Update 1/9]

Just a thought: If record companies are so obsessed with being in the selling-plastic-things business and DRM, why not defer to the USB album? The user doesn’t have to worry about ripping it and making sure all the tracks get named right, there’s ample room for varying album sizes, it’s re-useable, and you can have the music files in a DRM format like Apple’s fairplay AAC that attaches to a particular computer or user account. Maybe this kind of solution is too obvious for Sony. Some music groups have tried it, the White Stripes and the Fratellis among them, though I can’t figure out with what success.

Among other things, the widely talked about independent and variably priced Radiohead release of “In Rainbows” seems to have cracked people’s heads open just a bit more with regards to what is really possible with digital distribution. Moreover, two other developments, though smaller in scale, have also caught my attention: Tunecore and B.R.T.C. Tunecore is a remarkably simple iTunes publishing site; so that even without a label, truly independent musicians can get their work up on iTunes, get their own royalties, and keep their copyrights. This is for musicians what Lulu is for writers; that is to say: DIY. B.R.T.C. (Bum Rush the Charts) is a grassroots movement that is attempting to influence iTunes charts by getting mass numbers of people to buy some particular song. But a neat sidenote (that wasn’t even mentioned in the article I first read) is that the band is giving some of the profits away to charity. Predictably, when asked about the movement:

Don Hogarth, a spokesman for the Canadian Recording Industry Association, points out that MP3 sales only make up about 10 per cent of overall music sales. As such, he says, the “digital market is still a secondary concern” to record labels.

Hey, Mr. Hogarth, here’s a few line from Spoon’s “The Underdog” that you should think about: “You got no time for the messenger / got no regard for the thing that you don’t understand / you got no fear of the underdog / that’s why you will not survive!”

Over at Bokardo, a recent article about infoprefixation got me to thinking about an old problem. But rather than rehash old arguments, I’d just assume start with the basics of understanding information, since so much misunderstanding seems to occur at that level.

Information = Data + Context

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I’m gonna’ pick on this guy for two reasons. One, his web site has some UI issues. Two, he’s picking on Pixar’s new film, Cars. Christopher Kelly, the movie critic at the Star-telegram has decided that computer animation is a forumla and that he’s had enough. [Note: The review that this link originally went to is down. Strangely enough, the least of previous columns on Christopher Kelly's profile page is surprisingly brief.]

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