Gris's Journal

Nibbles and bits, with a pinch of salt...

A couple of tidbits (are eight tidbits a tidbyte?) I picked up in perusing our latest acquisitions....

"A nibble is a collection of four bits. Most computer systems do not provice efficient access to nibbles in memory. However, nibbles are interesting to us because it takes exactly one nibble to represent a single hexadecimal unit."
- Randall Hyde, Write great code, v. 1: Understanding the machine

I like that. A nibble, you realize, is half a byte. (I'm still waiting for them to make a unit called a "brownie.")

And from Edward F. Albin's Earth science made simple, a "Fun Fact":
"Since the ocean is about 3.5 percent salt, if it dried up completely, enough salt would be left behind to build a 290-km-tall, 1.5-km-thick wall around the equator. About 90 percent of that salt would be sodium chloride, or ordinary table salt."

And that's only 3% of the ocean... that's... a *lot* of water. Yes, yes, I *know*-- it's an ocean. But still, when you see a figure like that, for just a teeny tiny bit (nibble?) of it...

Posted by gris at December 22, 2004 01:56 PM