Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Download this information to your ear....

I just learned something for fun today:

The most remarkable feature of AB's Hi-Res processor is that it processes the incoming sounds at a rate of 90,000 times a second. In turn, its processor and implant chips does the math to pass the sound information in my cochea - at a rate of 83,000 times a second, in form of electrical simulation or "pulses"!!

So I did my math to figure out how much I "downloaded" the pulses in terms of "byte" as a digital file size, to my brain:

One Implant:
1 second: 83,000 pulses
1 minute of hearing:4,980,000 pulses
1 hour of hearing: 298,800,000 pulses
1 day of hearing: 7,171,200,000 pulses (similar to 7.1 GB of file size, about size of a DVD )
1 Week of hearing: 50,198,400,000
1 Month of hearing: 200,793,600,000
1 Year of hearing:: 2,619,280,800,000 (2.6 Terabytes of information about 366 DVD's in all!!)

Two Implants:
In 1 second: 166,000 pulses
1 minute of hearing: 9,960,000
1 hour of hearing: 597,600,000
1 day of hearing: 14,342,400,000, ( about 2 dvd's of information a day)
1 week of hearing: 100,396,800,000
1 Month of hearing: 401,587,200,000
1 Year of hearing: 5,238,561,600,000 (5.2 terabytes of information, about 732 DVD's worth!)

That is a lot of information to download.... it will take more than a few month for me to download a terabyte worth of information on my PC. Good news, I don't wear the implants when I go to sleep... thank god!!!

Smiling!

Dan

FYI: in computer parlance, a byte has 8 bits of information to resemble a character that you type. Also for DSL or Cable Modem, the rate of download is in "bits", not bytes!!! (lower case b stands for bit, capital letter B stands for byte) In reality, a pulse should be one bit of information, but I substituted the "bits" with "byte" for conceptual purposes like the size of a digital file instead of download speed.