Tag: Fun

James Joyces’ Ulysses (a famously long book) contains 265,000 words
Formatted as a simple Word document without images it occupies 1.66 MB on my hard drive.
So, dividing 250 Gigabytes by 1.6 Megabytes: 250,000,000,000 ÷ 1,660,000
gives the answer:  = 150,600 copies of Ulysses would fit onto the 250GB SSD

Let’s try to picture that:
Weight
One copy of this nice Folio edition weighs 3.5 kg
Therefore that makes a total of 527,108 kg = 518 UK tons  (about 100 elephants) fitting in the SSD

Shelf Space
One copy is 5 cm thick
That makes a total of 753,000 cm = 7.53 km of shelf space

Area of Paper
This Folio edition of Ulysses has 735 pages, each measuring 18 × 23.3 cm, that is 419.4 cm² (0.4194 m²)
0.4194 m² × 734 pages makes a total of 308 m² of typescript per copy (halved if you use both sides)
Therefore – Total area of paper required for the number of copies which would fit into the little SSD drive = 46,423,805 m²

There are one million square metres in one square kilometre, therefore it would require 46.4 km² of paper to store that amount of text.
That is a square 6.8 km on each side.

Here is a square of that size over central London (the fine grid lines on OS maps – just visible here – are 1km apart)

Wow! Or as the grandchildren would say, ‘awesome’.