Our world is all about information.People are constantly measuring and observing. We measure the height of snow or the size of sunspots. We track giraffe herds or subway riders. We count customers or concert tickets or cheeseburgers. Then we collect those facts into groups called data.
It’s a lot of data. Every day about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created. How much is that? Let’s say you buy the latest Star Wars movie on a Blu-ray (high-definition) disc. When the movie’s picture and sound files were stored on that disc, they became 25 gigabytes of data. So one Blu-ray movie equals 25,000,000,000 bytes. That already sounds like a lot of data. But you’d need 10 million Blu-ray movie discs to add up to 2.5 quintillion bytes. If you stacked those 10 million discs up, they’d be taller than four Eiffel towers.
And every day that truly towering amount of data is uploaded to the web. That’s great when you’re bored and browsing. But when you need to understand something quickly, too much data can be a problem. How do we get all those facts under control? Can we make data easier to understand?
LIKE HERDING GOATS
Imagine you’ve been given a flock of pygmy goats. Now you have to convince your parents to up your allowance to pay for goat food. You need to tell them all about your herd. How many breeds do you have? Which goat’s milk makes the best cheese? Do any do yoga? Just telling your parents a list of facts might put them to sleep. And you can’t show off scattered goats. You need to gather the herd into one pen. Then they’ll be easy to see.
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