OT: Acres of bacteria

[Longman, Bill]

> > Clint thus spoke:
> > name). A 
> > memory "card" of such a size, if made entirely of hydrogen 
> > atoms, would 
> > weigh about 567 million metric tons (again, if I have done 
> > the math right).
> 
> How much would it weigh if it were made of holes?
> 
> One thing that's a limit to memory is the address bus width. 
> That's the
> bottleneck between the CPU and the memory. With a 32 bit 
> address bus width,
> the addressable memory limit is 4GB. Most newer CPUs have a 
> 36 bit address
> bus giving them direct access to 64GB of RAM (G4s and most 
> i686s). The G5
> has a 42 bit address bus. We leave the calculation to Clint, 
> who'll probably
> compare the sheer size of this number to acres of bacteria....

Enter units, my *favorite* utility:

Assuming 1 bacteria = ~1 micron^2 then,

/home/longman
2k01> units
1989 units, 71 prefixes, 32 nonlinear units

You have: 2^42 micron^2
You want: acre
        * 0.0010867766
        / 920.1523
You have: 2^42 micron^2
You want: yard^2
        * 5.2600199
        / 0.19011335
You have: 2^64 micron^2
You want: mile^2
        * 7.1223277
        / 0.14040354

So just imagine....if memory technology were based on (small) E. coli, and
you had them all laid out on the floor, one next to the other, you'd need a
roomful of them for your G5's addressable memory. But you'd need several
square miles of them for its total memory space....

Clint, here's what I just got, assuming H is 1 amu:
You have: 2^128 amu
You want: tons
        * 6.2286327e+08
        / 1.6054888e-09