If I stacked 100 pieces of this paper, the resulting pile would only be 5 centimeters or 1.97 inches tall. I want to stress that this printer paper is the thinnest stuff that you can buy. Everests on top of each other, and it still wouldn’t be as tall as this stack of paper! It’s quite literally halfway to space! Put another way, you could stack 5 and a half Mt. That’s 4.3 times taller than the maximum height commercial planes fly at. If I were to assemble a stack of two billion pieces of the thinnest printer paper I could find, the resulting tower reaches 50 kilometers or 31.07 miles into the air. So, let’s make it a little more tangible. Written out, two billion is 2,000,000,000 – even after writing out all nine of those zeros, the concept is still abstract. The semantics of saying “two billion” obfuscates the magnitude of the number. Numbers at this magnitude are really hard to fathom. A short aside on size and the thinking rockĭepending on the device you’re reading this post on, your thinking rock has around one to two billion (or more) transistors stuffed inside it. Modern thinking rocks have fancy tricks to make these and other more advanced mathematical operations go faster, but essentially all a thinking rock does is very speedy addition all day. division is the count of subtracting the same number multiple times.subtraction is adding a negative number to a positive.multiplication is just adding the same number multiple times.These switches are combined in clever ways that, when powered by the aforementioned lightning (electricity), allow the rock to remember small amounts of information and to do addition. What is a thinking rock exactlyĪt its most basic level, a thinking rock is comprised of switches – called transistors – and wires that connect these switches together. If so, you’re in luck! Today we’re going to explore how the thinking rocks that power your computer are created. A cursory count puts the number of these rocks thinking on a daily basis north of a billion! With so many thinking rocks around, perhaps you’ve idly wondered how exactly a flattened rock stuffed chockfull of lightning gets made. Most people you know probably have at least one or two thinking rocks in their possession. You use a thinking rock to write a text, browse the internet, and play music. There are a lot of thinking rocks in use today. Not to oversimplify: first you have to flatten the rock and put lightning inside 3/4/17)Ī word of caution: if the rock thinks too hard it will become hot enough to boil 6/17/20) There is an excellent tuple of tweets by that go something like this:Ī CPU is literally a rock that we tricked into 3/4/17)
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