Skip to main content

a billion is big!

I just finished quashing a bug that gave me the run down for the last two hours, as is usually the case it derived from recently changed code. The cause of the bug was my omission of a line of code that initializes an important value to a non zero integer. I added the line and voila it worked great. Along the way I was looking at the database table column values and thinking about the number of unique values that a chosen database (testing on MySql currently) can provide an integer before it goes screwy (this is a major flaw of databases that I wish the vendors would get around solving, it should not be something for the db user to ever worry about..but that is fodder for another post). I don't know the actual max value for a standard MySql "integer" off hand but I am sure it is larger than a billion. (Just googled it, it is a range of about 5 billion centered around 0) Just for no reason I wanted to get an idea of just how big a billion is(I've done it before but I am bored and maybe you haven't thought about..*grin* ), so I wondered , how long would it take for me to count to a billion if I counted one integer per second?

Answer courtesy of the windows calculator:

1,000,000,000 seconds

= 1,000,000,000 seconds / 60 seconds = 16666666.66666666 minutes

= 16666666.66666 minutes / 60 minutes = 277777.777777 hours

= 277777.777777 hours / 24 hours = 11,574.07407 days

= 11574 days / 364.25 days = 31.77508 years!!

..and that is just a billion. So a billion seconds ago it was 1976, amazing. Like I said, a billion is big, now think of all those bits on your 30 gig (billion) music player! It's a wonder you don't grow old waiting to play the music that is on it. ;)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

the attributes of web 3.0...

As the US economy continues to suffer the doldrums of stagnant investment in many industries, belt tightening budgets in many of the largest cities and continuous rounds of lay offs at some of the oldest of corporations, it is little comfort to those suffering through economic problems that what is happening now, has happened before. True, the severity of the downturn might have been different but the common factors of people and businesses being forced to do more with less is the theme of the times. Like environmental shocks to an ecosystem, stresses to the economic system lead to people hunkering down to last the storm, but it is instructive to realize that during the storm, all that idle time in the shelter affords people the ability to solve previous or existing problems. Likewise, economic downturns enable enterprising individuals and corporations the ability to make bold decisions with regard to marketing , sales or product focus that can lead to incredible gains as the economic
1 comment
Read more

How many cofactors for inducing expression of every cell type?

Another revolution in iPSC technology announced: "Also known as iPS cells, these cells can become virtually any cell type in the human body -- just like embryonic stem cells. Then last year, Gladstone Senior Investigator Sheng Ding, PhD, announced that he had used a combination of small molecules and genetic factors to transform skin cells directly into neural stem cells. Today, Dr. Huang takes a new tack by using one genetic factor -- Sox2 -- to directly reprogram one cell type into another without reverting to the pluripotent state." -- So the method invented by Yamanaka is now refined to rely only 1 cofactor and b) directly generate the target cell type from the source cell type (skin to neuron) without the stem like intermediate stage.  It also mentions that oncogenic triggering was eliminated in their testing. Now comparative methods can be used to discover other types...the question is..is Sox2 critical for all types? It may be that skin to neuron relies on Sox2
Post a Comment
Read more

AgilEntity Architecture: Action Oriented Workflow

Permissions, fine grained versus management headache The usual method for determining which users can perform a given function on a given object in a managed system, employs providing those Users with specific access rights via the use of permissions. Often these permissions are also able to be granted to collections called Groups, to which Users are added. The combination of Permissions and Groups provides the ability to provide as atomic a dissemination of rights across the User space as possible. However, this granularity comes at the price of reduced efficiency for managing the created permissions and more importantly the Groups that collect Users designated to perform sets of actions. Essentially the Groups serve as access control lists in many systems, which for the variable and often changing environment of business applications means a need to constantly update the ACL’s (groups) in order to add or remove individuals based on their ability to perform cert
2 comments
Read more