This set me off on a train of thought…

I looked up the size of an HD movie. It appears that such a movie represents about 4 to 8 GB of data in uncompressed form, and compressed for over-the-net viewing it might weigh in at an off-the-cuff average of 2 GB of actual transmitted data. That’s 2³⁰ * 2, or 2,147,483,648 bytes of Data.

Twitter, as most geeks seem to know, is limited to 140 bytes (characters) per message. Why is this? It’s because that’s the message limit for an SMS text message as defined by the telephone companies.

So, an HD movie is the data equivalent of roughly 15,339,168 text messages. The phone companies seen to charge about 20 cents per text message across the board, data plans notwithstanding.

At that price, the phone companies think it’s worth $3,067,833.78 to stream that HD movie.

That same 140 bytes of data costs Netflix about 3.25*10^-9 cents.

That’s 0.00000000325 cents.

So, in terms of actual costs, a text message costs virtually nothing to send. Or you could say that it costs about one cent per 4 million text messages.

If you are a world-class text messager, you might be able to send about 1200 text messages a day., let’s say 35,000 or so a month. (There have been higher counts recorded!)

Text messaging plans are the worst deals on the planet. Printer ink? Pikers. For corruption and sheer craven greed, no one beats the telcos.

The photo is of Jeppe Hein’s Bench Around the Lake, a wonderfully whimsical set of swoopy benches that seem to spring out of the earth in places around the lake, do odd things, and disappear again. The only thing I have against them is that they are a photographically hideous shade of yellow, which pretty much knocks them out of the running for anything except black-and-white portraiture.

Oh well.

This tree had so many lights on it I understand NASA is looking into it for use as a planetary beacon.