"2MB of Knowledge"

When you're tired of watching Congress to get your daily ration of unadulterated buffoonery, you can always turn to that laugh-a-minute, kleptocratic, basket case of a nation, North Korea. For hot air, bombast, and complete obliviousness to common sense and humanity, North Korea takes the cake. Congress may be equally full of outrageous ass-clownery, but at least it doesn't murder and torture its opponents outright ... instead, it drives them crazy with ludicrous behavior until they want to kill themselves.

But back to North Korea. Nothing irritates the government of the Hermit Kingdom more than having anyone point out its shortcomings, and those who so much as hint that emperor Kim has no clothes are made the targets of enormous avalanches of ridiculously overblown rhetoric ... the latest example: South Korean president Lee Myung-bak was described in a typically shrill North Korean broadcast as  "human scum" and "an underwit with 2MB of knowledge."

Even for North Korea, describing someone as an "underwit" is pretty ... uh ... witty. Is an underwit considered dumber than a half-wit? And characterizing someone as having only "2MB of knowledge" is a pretty low blow.

So, how much memory does an average brain have, anyway?

Writing in Slate magazine, author Forrest Wickman tried to answer that question in his article, Your Brain’s Technical Specs: How Many Megabytes of Data Can the Human Mind Hold?

It seems that this is a question with no simple answer, because it depends on how you do your calculations. According to the article, most computational neuroscientists (?) estimate the storage capacity of the human brain to be between 10 and 100 terabytes*, although estimates range from a low of one lonely terabyte to a high of 1.5 petabytes**. This is a lot of storage, even at the low end.

But, in the humble opinion of yours truly, the storage capacity of the human brain is considerably less important than the ability to productively use all that stored knowledge. There are a lot of people in Congress, for instance, whose brains doubtless hold vast amounts of information, and yet they seem unable to process that stored knowledge in such a way that they can believe in things like trickle-down economics and "creation science," while denying the reality of climate change.

So ...

Does Mr Lee have only 2MB of knowledge? I doubt it. But however much he has, he's able to see through the bovine scat churned out by his northern relations. Too bad we don't have many Americans who can see through the Congressional equivalent, especially in an election year.

Have a good day. Apply your stored knowledge wisely. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

*By way of comparison, my very first computer, purchased in about 1988, had a 20MB hard drive.


** I expect that trying to apply a petabyte could get you slapped by Ms Murgatroyd ...

B.