The Life & Works of Dr. Joseph N. Pelton

Anyone that ends up writing over 50 books and over 300 articles would like to pretend that they are an adept linguist and wordsmith. Pelton freely admits that he is neither. He relies heavily on editors from publishers like Elsevier, Springer and on his good friend and co-author Peter Marshall, for editorial precision, accurate spelling and ultimately cohesive writing. But what he enjoys a great deal is creating new concepts and words to go along with them. Some of his favorites are TIUPILs, VIEWPILs and GHUIDs. These are terms he invented to illustrate "Information Overload"-a growing problem in modern society which he has addressed in several books. A "TUIPIL", which is pronounced "two - pill", represents "typical information use per individual lifetime"; and a Viewpil, which is pronounced "view- pill" represents "viewing per individual lifetime". A Tiupil is roughly based on the idea that a typical human being lives to be 70 years old and reads, writes and speaks some 20,000 words a day, with a word being considered roughly equivalent to 1 to 2 bytes or 8 to 16 bits of information.

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Thus a TIUPIL equates rather arbitrarily into 20,000 x 365 x 70 x 2 bytes = 1.022 billion bytes of information that we can round off to a simple billion words.

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This rough calculation more or less assumes that this usage of words by humans somehow all averages out between loquacious speakers and writers with the taciturn and speechless. It certainly prudently ignores such things as the likelihood that some women probably go over their quota while men are much less verbal and less likely to express their feelings. (Definitely one of many assumptions best left ignored). This first calculation allows us to calculate a GHIUD-pronounced "good" - which is, of course, a Global Human Information Usage in a Decade. There are about 7.5 billion people on Earth and 10 Years in a decade. If we multiply a TIUPIL by 7.5 billion and divide by 7 (70 years/7 = a decade) we would get a result that says that humans in a decade would read, write and speak the equivalent of about 1.1 quintillion bytes of information. This would be expressed as an exponential as 1.1 x 10 to the 18th power bytes, which would seem to be a very large number indeed, which actually has a name: it is 1.1 exabytes. One estimate has been put together that suggests that all words ever spoken by human beings since the start of languages in all parts of the world would come to 5 exabytes. Frankly I believe this is on the high side. But let's consider what amount of information we can now send, receive, process and store in terms of today's fiber optic cables, communications satellites or large computer data storage facilities? What is interesting to consider is how much information could be transmitted over something like the ViaSat 1 communications satellite, which can transmit 140 gigabits of information per second. It turns out that just this one high-throughput satellite could pump through one half of a GHIUD in only a year's time. And this is just one of hundreds of communication satellites. And while the ViaSat 1 is a very fast communications satellite, there are fiber optic cable systems with over 800 strands of cable that have a total throughput rate that could exceed 10 terabits/second of throughput or over 1.25 terabytes/second of transmit capacity. Such a fiber system could pump through the equivalent of 36 GHIUDs a year. And let's not stop there. There are data storage facilities, such as the one that the U.S. National Security Agency has built in Utah, that is capable of storing Yottabytes of data. A Yottabyte is expressed as 10 to the 24th power bytes of information. This means this one facility could store the equivalent of 200,000 times the amount of words ever uttered in the history of human civilization. Huh?

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This bring us up to VIEWPILs or Viewing Per Individual Lifetime. With today's digital processing and compression, a high-quality television channel can be sent over cable or via satellite at about 4 megabits per second. High Definition television requires on the order of 15 to 20 megabits per second. Remember a byte is 8 bits and it is important to keep these numbers straight. Any reference to a bit needs to be multiplied by 8 to get the corresponding number of bytes. What we also need to remember is that the human brain does not literally "see" everything it sees. It processes information to see patterns and information. According to Arthur C. Clarke, humans process information at the rate of only 64 bits/second. Indeed, he described a human as a "carbon-based bi-ped who processes information at 64 bit/second". Although there are thousands of times more information in a HDTV broadcast than a radio broadcast, the brain does not process much more than ten to a hundred times more information than it does with the spoken word. Otherwise our brains would, as expressed by one critic of television, be "turned into cornflakes." The point of all these linguistic and mathematical exercises related to TIUPILs, VIEWPILs, and GHIUDs is to note that the broadband systems we now have for communications, computer processing and storage are no longer being sized to accommodate human speech and conversation. These systems are being built to accommodate high-def television transmission and machine-to-machine communications. As we move more and more into the Age of the Internet of Things, that will next become the "Internet of Everything", digital communications will soar into levels of speed and volume unlike anything we have ever previously imagined. A company called Wind River, a subsidiary of Intel, has suggested that traffic generated by the Internet of Things may lead to a thirty-fold increase in data traffic in the four years between 2016 and 2020.