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June 19, 2009

Strange But True!

Q. Seems like everybody's twittering and tweeting these days but is there really e-infrastructure enough for the world's billions to be text-messaging each other at about the same time?

A. Short answer, yep, says Princeton computer scientist Perry Cook. A single tweet is 140 characters, which is 8x140 bits. Even with overhead, retransmissions due to errors, and so on, it can be assumed a tweet takes only about 2,000 bits or so. Just talking on your cell phone takes much more than that per second (your voice is coded into digital form and transmitted as digital Binary digITs, or bits, just like the characters of your tweets).


 
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