Friday, February 11, 2011

miniaturization, and "eighth"

I totally owned one of these. It was about 6 inches long and half an inch thick. (I realize that this latter sentence leaves me open to certain snide remarks being made.)




Now I own one of these. It's about an inch wide and about an eighth of an inch thick. It holds exactly 1 million times as much information as the first one (yes, it's a different sort of memory, but it still works out.)





By the way--when you say "eighth" out loud, do you pronounce it "tth", that is, with a hard t followed by the th sound? Or do you simply pronounce it with the th sound?

5 comments:

  1. yep yep. it's amazing how things have changed during our lifetime as far as technology goes.

    :)

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  2. Hey Brooke,

    What's really fascinating is that the person who strongly solved the game of connect four, using their universities super computer, had to do a whole bunch of extra mathematics because that supercomputer lacked 2 GB of hard drive space.

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  3. both the t and the th. weird that you noticed.

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  4. A-th. I never heard anyone say 8-th.

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  5. Martin, Joe--I've since learned that Aussies, who for the most part seemingly say "eight-th", aren't actually making the dental or interdental plosive "t" there, but are actually rather making a glottal stop that sounds remarkably like the plosive.

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