18th
Seven DVDs a day?
It’s hardly news that all y’all in the States are info junkies (to be sure, you’re not the only ones, but the story is about yanks, so shut up).
What’s pretty shocking is that whatever any of you sees/reads/hears/watches each day (EACH DAY!) on your spare time (SPARE TIME!) could fill 7 DVDs (SEVEN DVDs!).
Congratulations. That is a crapload of stuff. Now get out and start climbing trees or something. Yes, I will too. Maybe.
— Via Seed Magazine and LiveScience, From London.
Sorry, but I don’t get this at all.
A DVD can contain about 3 hours of standard-definition video. I don’t personally spend 21 hours a day watching TV, and I suspect neither do most people. So there must be some higher-bandwidth activity that’s accounting for the rest of the 7 DVDs. Certainly not reading books or looking at web pages. What is it? From the article:
A mix of old and new media contribute to our daily information diet, the study finds, including TV, radio, books, the Internet, movies, text messages and video games.
All of those are low-bandwidth except “the internet” and “video games.” I love my porn Tumblr, but I’m certainly not downloading 34 gigabytes of it every day. Video games? I don’t play any games most days, but I guess maybe the average American does? Fine, let’s assume they do. So how are we measuring this?
In terms of sheer bytes, computer and video games took up the lion’s share of data consumed. About 55 percent of the annual bytes Americans consumed were from computers and video games, the study found.
This is largely due to the powerful graphics chips used in some PC’s and gaming consoles, which can deliver up to 100 megabits per second, or eight times that of high definition TV.
Now that just makes no sense. Graphics capabilities are measured in terms of polygons and textures and rendering and so forth, not megabits per second (mbps). If you’re talking about the amount of data being sent to the screen, then sure: but the bandwidth of 1080i HD TV is around 1400 mbps. (Derivation: 1920 × 1080 pixels × 24 bits/pixel × 30 interlaced frames/second = 1,492,992,000 bits/second). To be fair, most console games only go up to 720p, but that’s still a good 1200 megabits per second. Not 100, or an eighth of 100. See how badly science reporting sucks? (EDIT: figures corrected. I suck too.)
I found the actual study (PDF) and here’s where the “eight times” figure comes from:
For each hardware type, we estimated the video throughput for an “average machine” in the class, playing an “average game.” High-performance gaming PCs use the most powerful processors in the world, called Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), to generate graphics. Some GPUs have over one billion transistors, and more than 200 parallel processors running at once. We estimate the effective compressed bandwidth of these machines at approximately 100 megabits per second — eight times that of high definition TV.
And how is TV measured?
Digital television is compressed for transmission and then uncompressed for viewing, and we measure the compressed bit rate. And if two people are watching the same show on the same TV set, it will show up twice in our measurements…
OK, so they’re measuring the compressed bit rate of a television broadcast — which is uncompressed by the time it’s “consumed” — but for video games, they look at the internal bandwidth of the graphics processor and multiply it by the time spent playing.
These are two completely different metrics, and it’s insane to compare them by saying one is eight times the other. What about the internal bandwidth of the cable company’s processors? What about the fact that the entire video game is stored on a single disc, or that you could record an hour of the video output on a DVD and it would take up the same amount of space as an hour of television?
It would make just as much sense to calculate the size of the genome of an apple tree and multiply it by the number of cells in a typical apple. Now look at how much data is in your lunch! Just look at it, you lazy American consumer!
