Quick Takes: Amazing Spider-Man #600 and Invincible Iron Man #14
Amazing Spider-Man #600
When evaluating the pupillary response in a patient, have them take off their sunglasses first.
Invincible Iron Man #14
We already know that Norman Osborn is no good at anatomy, but it turns out he is clueless at computer science as well. Here, when he is trying to convince the Russians to allow him in their county to look for fugitives Tony Stark and Pepper Potts, he refers to “picobytes of…data.”
There is no such thing as picobyte — it is impossible. A byte is made up of 8 bits*, and a bit is as small as you can subdivide a byte. A “picobyte” then, would refer to one trillionth (10-12) of a byte, which is orders of magnitude smaller than a byte can be divided.
I assume Osborn meant to say “petabyte” (a quadrillion bytes) — or maybe he meant Pikabyte, the loneliest of the Pokemon.
*There have been computer systems in which a byte is more or less than 8 bits, but 8 bits is standard now, and it was never more than 36 bits-per-byte.
October 11th, 2009 at 10:50 pm
Actually, there can be a picobyte or 8 picobits of data.
For example, if something occurs with probability about 1.83*10^-13 then knowing whether or not it has occurred has information value 8 picobits.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory for details
October 11th, 2009 at 11:28 pm
So, not only is Tony Stark on the run from the law, but he’s stolen all of Norman Osborn’s Pokemon cards! The fiend!
October 12th, 2009 at 1:24 am
Actually I’m not sure your “clarification” is technically correct. A byte has always meant 8 bits, as far as I am aware. However, word size has not always historically been 8 bits – an old DEC10, for example, as the name implies used 10 bit words. But I don’t think it every called them “bytes”.
October 12th, 2009 at 3:08 am
A word is 16 bits, unless you’re using a less common definition.
October 12th, 2009 at 4:17 am
arjw: Yes, it is now. Historically a word simply meant the unit of transfer along the bus – which has not, historically, always been in 8 bit chunks, 16 bit chunks, 32 bit chunks, or 64 bit chunks. The reason that 16 bits is typically a word now is that 16 bits was the norm for this unit for quite a long time – it’s fairly recent that 32 bit operating systems have existed, and even more recent that 64 bit systems have been around. So rather than redefine word to 32 and 64 bits, we get “double word” and “extended word”.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, mind you. Way back in the day when I had to do some DEC10 programming we were told that it used “10 bit words”, but it may well have been that this was an incorrect use of the term.
However, I do not recall ever hearing the word “byte” to mean something other than “8 bits”.
October 12th, 2009 at 6:15 am
Bottom right corner: the saddest Iron Man ever.
October 12th, 2009 at 9:22 am
“For example, if something occurs with probability about 1.83*10^-13 then knowing whether or not it has occurred has information value 8 picobits.”
It’s very possible that you know a lot more about information theory than I do, but logically, since the event either happened or it didn’t happen, knowing whether it happened or not represents one (whole) discrete bit of data, with a binary value equal to either 0 or 1 (0= it didn’t happen, 1= it did), independent of the weight or utility of that information, and setting aside the coding necessary to tell us what that one bit of data represents.
October 12th, 2009 at 10:05 am
One doubts that Stark has absconded with a small probability that a bit of information may have existed or may come into existence at some point in time.
October 12th, 2009 at 10:28 am
Official Comment
Historically, there have been systems that used non-8-bit bytes, before the 8-bit became standard. For instance, UNIVAC 1100/2200 used 6- and 9-bit bytes and the IBM 360 and PDP-10 also used non-8-bit bytes.
Then there’s C++ (from the C/C++ FAQ Lite)
October 12th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
Regarding the size of a byte from Wikipedia:
“A byte (pronounced /ˈbaɪt/) is a unit of information storage representing the smallest addressable element for a given computer architecture. It often designates a sequence of bits (binary digits) whose length is determined by the architecture. However, the use of a byte to mean eight bits has become ubiquitous.”
-So originally a byte was the basic unit of data of a given computer architecture, but because the most common early computers were 8 bit computers with 8 bit bytes, common usage refined the byte as 8 bits. All hail the Apple II and its 8 bit MosTek R6502 CPU!
October 12th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
well as for #1: The girls are wearing sunglasses at night so perhaps they’re simply ultra-sensitive to light…though why you would still check for papillary response I don’t know.
As for #2. Perhaps Osborne knows the info he’s giving is B.S, and so he’s trying to bluff them. And it is the Green Goblin after all so rather than make the request plausible, he’s trying to confuse them with total technobabble.
October 12th, 2009 at 4:38 pm
Favorite computer jargon: Half a byte is a nibble (or nybble).
October 12th, 2009 at 8:30 pm
You have a problem with your MOST recent post..here’s what you typed for Spiderman 600
When evaluating the papillary response in a patient, have them
You should have typed pupillary cmon Doc, haha…Great site.
October 12th, 2009 at 9:08 pm
what I want to know is why the lady in the bottom left of the spiderman pic listening to his arm when he doesnt have a BP cuff on.
October 13th, 2009 at 12:20 am
Karl:
“…since the event either happened or it didn’t happen, knowing whether it happened or not represents one (whole) discrete bit of data, with a binary value equal to either 0 or 1 (0= it didn’t happen, 1= it did), independent of the weight or utility of that information…”
Using this logic, knowing whether a card is a spade and knowing if it is the jack of spades have the same information value.
I like to think of it this way. If you’re playing 20 questions, the best questions (questions that have answers with most information value) are those which about halve the possibilities.
October 13th, 2009 at 8:06 am
Rono, you are talking about information “value” in regards to information utility, not data size.
“Using this logic, knowing whether a card is a spade and knowing if it is the jack of spades have the same information value.”
No, that only sort of follows if you have two registers to populate, one that always represents “spadeness” and one that always represents “Jack of Spadeness” to assign 0 or 1 values, but then you’d be using two different encoding schemes.
But you missed the point, both of thoses peices of data require a minimum of one bit of data to encode, even if you use a special, unique coding scheme for each.
Please provide an example of how you would encode any piece of data in less than one bit.
I think you’re equating information theory with data storage/coding, and while they closely related, they’re not the same thing.
Information theory might say that if I send you 10MB of data, and you already had 9MB of it, that I only transmited 1MB of inforamtion to you, but I did transmit 10MB (gross) of data to you, and you didn’t know that you only got 1MB (net) of new information until you compared what you recieved to what you already had.
October 14th, 2009 at 11:54 pm
Karl,
It seems we’re talking about different things. I am saying that there can be data less than one bit and you’re saying (if I understand you correctly) that any data requires an integer number of bits to store/encode.
Case in point, Stark could have taken data requiring large storage space but containing little information.
Btw, I am not really an expert (or even formally trained) in Information Theory, just interested in it.
Also, technically, petabytes of data IS “picobytes” of data, only a very large number of picobytes.
October 15th, 2009 at 7:18 pm
Obviously Stark is talking about Homeopathic data.
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