You ever wonder what would happen if you could record everything you heard and said in your life? Put it into one large text file so you could search through and remember how you rejected on your first date?

So how much do you say and hear in your life? Okay, so this is the shadiest number in the equation, but how many words do you think you hear and say in a day? Not a foggiest idea? Me too.

So, here is a bench mark. Shakespear's Hamlet is about 27,000 words, and it's about 3 hours long. Now that includes scene directions and character headers, so you can take it down a notch to, say 24,000 words. In other words, an hour of full blown conversation is about 8000 words, or 133 words a minute.

Now there is no way you spend 16 hours of your waking time engaging in, or listening to full blown conversation. Not even 8 hours. But let's slightly over estimate and say you hear 3000 words an hour on average and 3000x16 = 48,000 words a day.

48,000 words a day, 17,520,000 words in a year, 1,401,600,000 words in your 80 year life time.

A word is about 4 letters long on average, and you need a space to separate the words, so assume you need 5 characters per word. So in your life time, everything you say and hear can be stored in 7,008,000,000 characters.

A character is a byte, so you're looking at 7 Gb for everything you say and hear in your lifetime. And that's not taking into account any compression you apply on it, which could drop it easily down to less than a Gb.

So it quite doesn't fit into any of the USB memory sticks shown above, but there are ones out there larger than 8 Gb. Really, your life fits into a collection of plastic, silicon, and copper the size of a quarter.

So what does this mean? I don't know. But really makes you wonder sometimes.

Labels: random calculations