.071 Megabytes was the total memory that was on the computer aboard Apollo 11 in 1969 when the first humans first landed on the moon. Today, the Apple X has 64,000 megabytes (or 64 GB).
Two years after the moon landing a 15-key hand held calculator made by Sharp (Model EL-8, imported from Japan), was only able to do four basic arithmetic functions (no square root or % function). It was sold for $345 in the U.S. Today, the most basic 24-key hand held calculator, solar powered, 8 digit display, with % MC RC and square root functions at Staples, will set you back $3.99. You will spend more than that for lunch at any fast food diner. And remember, $345 for the Sharp calculator was in 1970's dollar. Account for inflation and we're talking some serious financial outlay then and now. In the 70's minimum wage was $1.60 an hour. How in the world did people manage back then? Well, a minimum wage earner then had to work 215 hours, pay no taxes on his/her wages, to afford the Sharp calculator. Today, the minimum wage earner will work for less than 20 minutes to buy the basic calculator sold at Staples. Back to 1969. How did Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins manage to reach the moon and back with a "computer" so puny no toy designer will use on a remote controlled toy car designed for six year old kids today? A well known story about the first moon landing was that Neil Armstrong took over the controls of the moon lander when he realized the designated programmed landing zone was not a safe one. His training, his disciplined engineering mind and resolute courage took over the lander and the rest is history. His mind, used to using slide rules (a relic and a collectible item today), was his main asset unaided by even a minuscule amount of high tech gadgetry we see today in video games alone. The support personnel back on earth were using the same slide rule that was the main tool all engineers then used to calculate everything from designing the rockets; the capsules, the moon lander; fuel mixtures; mapping the entire journey from here to the moon, etc., How did Armstrong manage to achieve such a feat a quarter million miles away from earth? Answer: "the brain’s memory storage capacity is something closer to around 2.5 petabytes (or a million gigabytes). For comparison, if your brain worked like a digital video recorder in a television, 2.5 petabytes would be enough to hold three million hours of TV shows. You would have to leave the TV running continuously for more than 300 years to use up all that storage". That is a quote from a Scientific American article. So, Apple X has 64 gigabytes. The scale of puniness just got got turned upside down big time, didn't it? The human brain is indeed that magnificent! And Neil Armstrong probably used only a small percentage of his brain capacity to maneuver the lander. He had hours of practice with the lander on earth's gravity months earlier. The challenge was doing the same chore at 1/6 the gravitational pull that he was used to on earth, made all the necessary hand/eye manipulation to adapt to the airless environment with little fuel to spare. And he did it flawlessly. A three-pound mass of brain matter was all he relied on. Apple X, eat your heart out. That is how amazingly phenomenal the human brain is. Unfortunately, it is not invincible. It can degrade with time, a natural process called aging. Obviously, we will have to admit that an average 65 year old today has not had the time or inclination to have accumulated the amount of information that even come close to filling up 2.5 petabytes of memory capacity - not even close. Nevertheless, whatever we had accumulated in memory, bit by bit, are all still there. The problem is that our retrieval system, unlike a computer, is likely to malfunction with age. We forget. We cannot recall. Learning new stuff gets a bit harder, if not entirely impossible. Often, we give up even before trying. Is there hope? I think so. Back to the mid 60's one more time. A milestone of some sort was something my classmates and I relished as we started the first semester of the third year of a five year engineering education. For the first time we were required to get a slide rule, learn to use it via a 2- day tutorial. From then on it became almost an appendage we could not be without at all times while in class. The slide rule was not just a badge for junior engineering students, it was our pride and joy. Invented in the 17th century, the slide rule was practically an analog computer. It was in use until the early 1970's. By 1974 manufacturers stopped making them. In no time the hand held Texas Instruments scientific calculator emerged as the new status symbol among college students and young engineers. During my time, the U.S. made K & E, slide rule was king; hence, out of reach for most of us. I couldn't afford the K & E so most of my classmates and I settled for the Hemmi, a much cheaper Japanese made and exact clone of the K & E. But instead of a U.S. hardwood for its slides, bamboo was used. However, bamboo was not only harder it was actually better at dealing with the humidity of the tropics. A handful of my classmates who had K & E's resorted to talcum powder to deal with the sticky slides. The Hemmi was impervious to the changing humidity. I thought I'd digress there for a bit. In 2015, the world's population of 65 and older were a mere 8.7% (though still a significant number at 617 million). But by 2050 it will double to 17%. It is a much higher percentage in the developed world. In the U.S. the percentage in 2015 was already 15.6% and it is projected at 22.1% by 2050, or 1/5 of the total American population. One major reason for the percentage number is the fact that birth rate in the developed world has declined and expected to continue to track that trajectory. Along with better health care and the ever developing medical breakthroughs, the aging population will continue to grow. There is therefore a growing need for the 65 and over to stay mentally capable. Mentally capable can be a lot of things but it should primarily mean that the aging population will have to maintain a good part of their cognitive and brain-related coping skills. It is for the obvious reasons, but significantly, seniors ought to be able to sustain a "normal" and qualitatively meaningful life for as long as it is possible without causing society to carry a much too heavy burden, as brutally frank as that statement might sound. Since 1980 thru 2010 the number of 90 year old citizens in the U.S. had tripled to 1.9 million and in 2050 it will have reached 7.6 million. If it were a nation, it will be the equivalent to the population now living in Papua New Guinea or Hong Kong. That number of people, 90 and older, is more than there are people in each of 145 other countries and territories around the world. What has this all got to do with .071 Megabytes? The burgeoning age category referred to in the last paragraph will, sooner or later, approach that downward threshold of a declining memory approaching .071 Megabytes at their twilight's last moments. Again, as brutally frank as that statement is, who can argue with that? Who will? Who will say they have a different destination or life trajectory? That is where everyone is heading. But it is not all dark and gloomy because there is a hopeful message. Indeed, growing old should not be a spiral death sentence into oblivion. I will explain. Life expectancy aside, whether one gets to be seventy, eighty or ninety, each senior person and anyone who sooner or later will join that special age group will have to realize that the brain, like any muscle, is defined by this one little rule. Use it or lose it. I am not a neurologist nor a specialist in brain therapy so this is merely one musing about how we deal with aging. Heredity may have a lot to do with long-lived cognitive skills but there has to be some merit in mental health management already known to science today. We know about the 100 billion neurons in an average brain and how it can do as many as a hundred trillion connections in seconds. If we were to map the brain like a globe, it has a geography of some sort. There is the temporal lobe, for example, near the ear that is responsible for processing memory. Towards the back of the head is where vision gets interpreted from information coming from the eyes via the optic nerves. The brain is capable of memory storage that is the envy of any self-respecting super computer (not that computers are capable of self-respect) but the problem becomes when our retrieval system starts to decline or malfunction. I have a better analogy. I've touched on this for a bit once before but with a little twist. With the brain as a globe, I say it has a hundred billion huts or living quarters in it that neurologists call neurons. At birth, or perhaps even before that, these huts start to take in "residents" in them. One "resident" per hut and by the time we made it to adulthood a good several billion of the hundred billion huts are now occupied - with each resident able to communicate in multiple ways from resident to adjoining resident many times per second. By then the whole globe is a cacophony of conversations, many trillions of them concurrently and simultaneously. A good number all talking at the same time is what I'd call brain activity, whether we're awake or asleep. At the peak of our cognitive skills we, our mind or what we think to be our consciousness, is able to "hear" or interpret a lot of these "conversations" between huts (or residents in those huts). We get older and soon many of those residents become lazy if not prompted from time to time to be active. Many become dormant, even. Soon we may not hear from them anymore. Memory starts to fail. So, when some doctors say we need to get the brain active, it could mean keeping those "residents" and their "huts" always warm and ready to do something. Many of these residents, willing to stay up and awake may go into slumber if all we do is watch TV, for example. Just watching or becoming a bystander could very well put them into a state of drowsiness, dozing off, and some may never wake up. Reading will perk them up. Writing is better still because now we're keeping many of them on their toes. And remember this, after a while, Facebook is no longer that stimulating to them. But keeping the residents on their toes is easier said than done. I truly believe that the best activity the brain can be exercised is when we use activities that use hand and eye coordination to perform varied tasks. These tasks do not necessarily need to be complex. I understand it is not everyone who can do a lot of physical activities such as walking or swimming. But being physically active does provide invaluable brain stimulation. Even if we are not too capable anymore of locomotive activities our brain, even while sitting down, could use a lot of hand/eye activities from craft and hobbies, puzzle solving, critical analysis, creating projects, playing cards and board games. And don't forget, writing is one simple hand/eye activity, often underestimated. Scribbling with a pen or pencil or tapping away at keys on a tablet or computer is better than just swiping at the screen from one YouTube site to another, one Facebook page to the next. Writing does not have to be anything more than a journal, a diary, letters to friends or family. Anything to get those "residents" up and about. The worst we can do is led them to a life of laziness or inactivity. I think that is what is meant by: "Use it or lose it". Hunched over a palm size screen is now mistaken to being busy. We forget that sometimes gazing towards and over the horizon or at anything around us on a quiet moment - thinking, contemplating, summoning up distant memories to keep us company momentarily - is better at keeping the "residents" to "help" and to be active. Keeping those "residents" to converse, encouraging them to light up those synapses, and keep as many connections as possible and listening to the loud mental noises they create, cheering them on, tickling them incessantly, is what consciousness is all about. When you realized you haven't read a book within the last year when you used to read them regularly, imagine what the "residents" are saying now. They may be tired but they'd rather be busy. They are polite too so you will not hear them complain. But they will retreat when they are ignored; and rather than bothering you, they will just fade away. "Use them or lose them." Post notes: Long before words like "exponential" or "logarithmic" got into common conversation, often misused or misapplied and misunderstood even, the slide rule lived by the rules of mathematical exponents and logarithmic scales. No batteries to replace or charging needed but required hand/eye manipulation. These analog "computers" were behind much of the industrial revolution, bridge and skyscraper construction that we still see today. From the construction of the Eiffel Tower, the Hoover Dam to the building and launching of the Atlas rockets, the slide rules were what engineers relied on. We shouldn't forget that. | ||
A few years after leaving college someone stole my old Hemmi slide rule at the boarding house. Though I never once had any use for a slide rule anymore, I missed it. Today, I have a vintage circular slide rule shown below. It's funny because it is also made in Japan. Though not a full scale slide rule, it must have served production or factory engineers then what today's pocket calculators do to make quick and dirty calculations. It still works.  Recommended Brain Exercisers for the Brain 8 to 80 Guaishou Brain Teasers (1st photo) available online is very popular and I find the 16 piece stainless steel pairs great hand/eye tools to challenge the brain. Each pair are two identical pieces, hooked together. The object is to unhook them and put them back together again. Looks easy but trust me the challenge is harder than you think. They cannot be forced apart. They have to be maneuvered in such a way that they would separate very smoothly (like silk), each pair will untangle only via one particularly specific way. It will require lots of patience because it will take hours and days even to figure out the right technique for each one. I've only done half of them so far, on and off. The thing is, by the time you get to the last one, you will have forgotten how you did the first. But it is challenging and the perfect exercise to get your "residents" on their toes. and a good dose of hand/eye coordination.  |
Below is another seemingly simply jigsaw-like puzzle. After I ordered one online, I made three "clones" (another reason to do wood works) with different configurations with varying degrees of difficulty. Deceptively easy but not quite. And the peices are enclosed in a hexagon base - my favorite polygon. The same six-sided structure that is the favorite of bees to construct their honeycomb.
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