A TERRA BYTE memory!

I was promised an external hard disk of memory space 1 TB by my father days ago. I was too happy about it and I even started planning how to create partitions in it to store movies, songs and my college files’ backups. 1 TB is actually more than enough for me but each time I see 1 TB as 1024 GB, I get excited and when I see each GB as 1024 Mb I still get excited.

As the saying goes “necessity is the mother of invention”, we required devices to store memory so that the task of remembering most of the things could be avoided. And after necessity, it got modified on its own to luxury. I say this because, we now use hard disks not only to store important information, but also for less important information like movies, games etc.

And we now have changed so much, that we now depend entirely on these memory storage devices, and any failure or a problem in retrieving data from it would irk us a lot! We even have the facility of “reminders” on mobile phones which make us lazier. “Laziness to remember things”! And is it for this reason that humans have been given a great amount of memory space in brain??

A quote from some researchers:

"The human brain contains about 50 billion to 200 billion neurons (nobody knows how many for sure), each of which interfaces with 1,000 to 100,000 other neurons through 100 trillion (10^14) to 10 quadrillion (10^16) synaptic junctions. Each synapse possesses a variable firing threshold which is reduced as the neuron is repeatedly activated. If we assume that the firing threshold at each synapse can assume 256 distinguishable levels, and if we suppose that there are 20,000 shared synapses per neuron (10,000 per neuron), then the total information storage capacity of the synapses in the cortex would be of the order of 500 to 1,000 terabytes. (Of course, if the brain's storage of information takes place at a molecular level, then I would be afraid to hazard a guess regarding how many bytes can be stored in the brain. One estimate has placed it at about 3.6 X 10^19 bytes.)"

It is the human tendency to do away with all that one has, and search for the non-available ones! Man must understand that it is absolutely impossible to compete with nature. All his inventions have their roots with nature. Seeing a bird, he invented the aero plane, seeing a human, he invented the robot, seeing a caterpillar he invented the train and so on…

Such inventions may look amazing, but the real appreciation must go only to nature!!!

Cheers :)

- ∫.∫rikrishnan