If I read 300 words per minute of text (an average of two syllables per word if it matters), just how much text info am I processing?
That is, how do I determine the number of bits or bytes of data I’m absorbing per second? How many bytes in an average word?
Well ignoring compression, each character of text takes one byte, if we assume that the average word is six letters long,
300 *6 = 1800 characters per minute
Except we missed spaces, so add another 300 = 2100
divide by 60 to get characters per second = 35
Multiply by 8 (assuming we’re using 8 bits) to get bits per second = 280
280 bits per second, or 280 baud, or about 1/200th of the speed of a 56K modem.
Damn I love this board.
Thanks Mangetout…
280 baud, huh? Can’t wait till they install Gigabit ethernet in my brain.
I should mention that there’s a considerable margin of error in those calculations; there was a fair bit of approximation and assumption in there. (plus a 56K modem almost never achieves sustained 56K transfer).
I remember the old old days of modems (i.e. 1985 or so). I found I coud read text at 300baud easily, 1200 baud required speed-reading, during which some info was lost, and the heady 2400baud required frequent text pauses.
Ah, memories.
Most people with decent reading skills can keep up with a 1200bps modem transferring text. 2400bps is beyond my ability for sure.
People who remember the days of dialing into bulletin boards with 300, 1200, and 2400 bps modems probably remember being able to read the text much faster than it could be sent with a 300, some people struggled at 1200, and I don’t remember anyone who could keep up with 2400.
Mangetout, are we following each other around today or what?
Dang Bryan, stole my line.
Funny; I was just about to say that myself.
what if we count the “video” that we see? How many megapixels is normal vision equivalent to? What sort of bandwidth would be required to broadcast exactly what i’m seeing (in the detail i’m seeing it)? After all, when we read we are not getting direct input as to what letters are there, rather we see an image (jpeg if you will) of that letter/word and our brain does pseudo-OCR to tell us what it is. We still see the words with pretty high resolution (let’s presume we’re talking about normal vision).
That will be tricky to calculate because you don’t actually ‘see’ as much as you think you do; your brain fills in a heck of a lot and even though the rods and cones in the eye could be compared to pixels in a CCD, the way that we percieve things is different.
Mangetout: Since that question isn’t answerable, howsabout this one: What is the minimum resolution (DPI or some equivalent) for something to look real (nonpixellated, at least) at arm’s length (something more than a foot, maybe)?
I’m sure I’ll end up researching this myself, but I don’t really know where to begin…
There have actually been studies to generate ballpark figures. Im not sure how. I do recall that vision, due to its non-serial nature (you can only listen to one voice at a time) is the ‘highest bandwidth sense.’