Help - A BIG Mistake ?
By Gus Kilthau
@Ceerios (4698)
Goodfellow, Texas
November 30, 2016 5:38pm CST
Help - A BIG Mistake ? -
You know what? It is really painful to be so good looking as I happen to be and as dumb as a rock when it comes to mathematics and that sort of stuff.
I got a 32-Gigabyte Flash Drive for my lunchtime desert and showed the thing to my bride. Her problem and my problem are the same. Both of us are flat stupid with numbers.
The old gal asked me what I was planning on doing with that new Flash Drive. I explained to her that it was to be the repository for some E-books that were in the making at this moment in time. She asked me how many E-books could I fit onto that new Flash Drive.
I stuttered and stammered for a bit (pardon the pun) and then explained, "A whole bunch of books."
Later, out of sight of my companion, I tried to figure out just how many E-books could fit onto the new Flash Drive. Trying to be somewhat conservative about it, here's what I came up with:
1 fairly typical (average size) word in a book needs about 10 characters, like "a, b, or c."
Each 1 character will be composed of about 10 bits of data - 100 per typical spelled-out word.
Each page will contain about 50 lines and each line will hold 20 words, thus 1,000 words
Therefore each page will contain 20 words x 50 lines x 100 bits
Each book will contain about 200 pages
Thus, each book will contain 200 pages x 100,000 bits = 20 million bits = 2,000,000 bytes
My 32 Gigabyte Flash Drive will hold 16,000 books. (using 10 bits per byte just to keep it easy)
I must be missing something here. Sixteen thousand books? That just plain does not sound correct to me. so --- if any of you arithmetic geniuses around here can figure it out, I would be most obliged to you should you have the kindness to clue me in.
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Image - my new 32 Gig Flash Drive
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8 people like this
7 responses
@topffer (42156)
• France
1 Dec 16
It depends mainly of the format of the ebooks. I had a look on "epub" ebooks on my drives, and their average size is 300 000 bytes. It includes pictures for the front and back covers. So, you can put more than 3 000 epub ebooks in 1 Gb, probably about 40 000 on a 32 Gb flash drive.
2 people like this
@topffer (42156)
• France
1 Dec 16
@Ceerios The archeologist was certainly American to have thought to look at the parking ticket
. It made my day when I learned that American archeologists where doing typologies of whiskey bottles to date Indian burials. And this is true
.
Speaking of what you can store on a card, I have a 32 Gb card in my phone, and half of it is occupied by an offline version of the French Wikipedia. It is less important than the English version, but it would probably be possible to put the complete English Wikipedia on a 32 Gb flash card.
. It made my day when I learned that American archeologists where doing typologies of whiskey bottles to date Indian burials. And this is true.
Speaking of what you can store on a card, I have a 32 Gb card in my phone, and half of it is occupied by an offline version of the French Wikipedia. It is less important than the English version, but it would probably be possible to put the complete English Wikipedia on a 32 Gb flash card.1 person likes this
@Ceerios (4698)
• Goodfellow, Texas
1 Dec 16
@topffer - Hi there, "Digger" - The amount of stuff that will fit into that tiny gadget is truly immense. I had the feeling that I had overestimated how much stuff would fit, but the audience here is all telling me that I probably underestimated the flash drive's capacity.
I read a piece the other day about a new discovery made by some Egyptian archiologists. They uncovered a village over there that they believe to be about 7,000 years old. The dating was estimated by the overtime parking ticket that was found on a camel skeleton found still tied to a post outside of what apparently was some sort of local pub sort of thing in that uncovered village... -Gus-
-Gus-1 person likes this
@allknowing (135903)
• India
30 Nov 16
Oh no!! You have messed it all up. You fogot to add spaces, punctuation marks and even emoticons spread all over the place. Please recalculate. No marks until you do it
2 people like this
@allknowing (135903)
• India
1 Dec 16
@Asylum You are right. Images eat up hundreds of bytes.
2 people like this
@Ceerios (4698)
• Goodfellow, Texas
1 Dec 16
@allknowing - Howdy there, Friend Smile-A-Minute...
Well. I could have utilized the ordinary 8 bits each per alphabetical and grammatical "thing," but I thought to account for the spaces, the periods, the commas (etc.) by using 10 bits instead. That gives a 20% increase which is probably a little bit more than enough. Maybe not, but maybe so. As they say in the "old country," "Only the cuckoo bird knows..."
-Gus-
1 person likes this
@Asylum (47893)
• Manchester, England
1 Dec 16
A 32 Gb flash drive is far larger than many people realise and should certainly hold several thousand books, depending on the book size of course.
The old floppy drive had a capacity of 1.38 Mb, so that flash drive equates to over 20,000 floppy disks.
2 people like this
@Ceerios (4698)
• Goodfellow, Texas
1 Dec 16
@Asylum - Howdy Koalemos - Ah yes - Those old-timey floppy disk drives. I had some that held only 160 megabytes. And then they improved on them such that I began to get some that went up "as high" as 360 Mb. I used to struggle to learn enough stuff to even fill up one of those, One of the commercial systems I used for a time had 12-inch diameter floppies. I don't recall their capacity, but it was not very much. -Gus-
1 person likes this
-Gus-
@Ceerios (4698)
• Goodfellow, Texas
1 Dec 16
@LadyDuck - Ms Anna - My own answer to "How many books fit onto a 32-GB Flash Drive?" was "A lot of books." I may look like a genius and all of that, but in mathematics I am flat stupid. (And, forget the math today and just have lots of fun.) -Gus-
1 person likes this
@Ceerios (4698)
• Goodfellow, Texas
2 Dec 16
@LadyDuck - Ms Anna - One time I was to undergo a big examination in chemistry. I had just before that moment sat for an important mathematics examination - and I knew full well that I had failed that math test. The chemistry professor looked at me and recognized that I was distressed with having, once again, messed up in mathematics and so, refused to let me take the chemistry exam that day. Math and I do not get along with each other at all. -Gus-
1 person likes this
