New unit of measurement: The Bible?

The Bible turns out to be a handy unit of measurement,
particularly when you’re trying to help folks some grasp
large storage media or data transfer rates.

It doesn’t matter whether you believe in what’s in it, of
course, it’s just that most folks have seen one. I’d wager
that most folks have a reasonable concept of its size, even
if only in heft or “thud factor”.

I used it as an example way back when as I tried to convey
some concepts to my parents. This disk? It could hold X
bibles! And this connection here, we can send the entire
Bible
in Y seconds! Wow!

A random copy of The Bible, text only, from project
Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org) “weighs in” at roughly
5 megabytes.

With that as a unit of measure:

My phone now has enough memory for about 200 Bibles.

The USB thumb drive on my keychain? Over 6,000 Bibles. (6 KiloBibles?)

And the new hard disk I just installed?

186,000+ Bibles. Almost two tenths of a MegaBible.

Now doesn’t that just sound way more impressive?

1 thought on “New unit of measurement: The Bible?”

  1. Hi Leo,
    Very nice example to use bibles as an unit of measure. My better half explained it to me as so many dictionaries:-) I was impressed!
    First I had to google to see what a usb thumb drive is.I hope that you have a very strong keyring, 6 kilobibles are very heavy.
    Yvonne A in A:-)

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