That doesn't work anyway, since based on wheat variety, growing season, and grinding method, different flours have different information density.
this post was submitted on 13 May 2025
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They have an international prototype sack of flour in an old missile silo in Kansas. Ultimately that's what all the measurements are relative to
And the "Room Temperature" room, which is located in Greendale.
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I like to read bedtime stories to my wheat, so it learns more and has higher information density
I just plug mine into USB ports
Sounds like the culinary world would benefit from having a measurement system that accounts for these factors.
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Wouldn't this make the units temperature-dependent?
Landauer limit is one kTln2 per bit of information, so at 300K about 3 zeptojoule per bit.
Dividing by c² we get 32 micro-quectogram per bit, so 32 yoctogram per terabit. 256 yoctogram per terabyte.
The Author wants half a septillion terabytes, 0.5•10²⁴ terabytes, half a yotta-terabyte.
That makes 128 grams.
Since I don't know what on earth "a cup of flour" is, I can't judge if the comic character proposes a reasonable conversion, but 0.1kg seems like a reasonable amount to use in cooking.
For baking I would rather have my units temperature dependent than density dependent (I can compact my flour or work with water or nuts, all having different densities, but my room temperature will always be roughly 300).
I endorse einstein-landauer units.
184 grams is a touch high for "a cup of flour", but I'm not gonna check your math, and the comic probably wanted to use "close enough" round-ish numbers. The weight of a cup of flour is usually somewhere between 120g and 145g, going by the conversions used by major baking recipe publishers like King Arthur, Cooks Illustrated, Washington Post, New York Times, etc.
I fear their apartment is at -50°C and this is a cry for help.
At least I am relieved to know that even acclaimed authors native to the cup-measurement system don't know what "a cup of flour is".
I'll be off baking my pannenkoek with 150g of flour then.
I figured it out. Typed the ln2 into my text and then forgot it in the calculator.
Great, I'ma redo alll my numbers then rq
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The real problem is measuring flour by volume instead of mass.
Solve both by measuring with moles
are other burrowing animals also ok?
If you don't have a mole at home, you can substitute with a gopher.
You can fit two moles in a liter, but a gopher is too big
What about lemmings :-)
Except that moles would only work for counting granules of ground flour, as there is no "flour" molecule. Also, you'd need to have a very accurate measurement of the average mass of a single granule (or you'd need a packing efficiency coefficient and an average granule radius, otherwise you'd have to literally count them. Also, a mole of flour granules would be INSANELY large. 6.02*10^23 of anything larger than a macromolecule is no joke. At this point, since you'd have to weigh it or measure its volume anyway (unless you feel like counting microscopic flour particles for the next few trillion years), you might as well just use grams.
There's a better way: German flour types. They're specifying mineral content, e.g. standard "white flour" is Type 405, meaning that when you pyrolyse 100g of flour, 405mg of ashes will be left. As the minerals were all in carbon solution before, and temperatures are low enough to not melt them into slag, you're essentially left with single atoms. Close enough at least for an assumption. If you disagree I shall hand you a mortar.
Of course, that doesn't specify everything. I suggest also measuring the released energy, then jot both numbers down on the complex plane. So you have joule-moles of flour.
We have now reached the peak: figure out how much flour you have by burning it to ash, then carefully measure the mass of that to figure out the amount of flour you need.
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Made even worse by mixing cups, spoons, pints, gallons and their crazy ratios
Information is physical? I'm gonna need a source on that one.
The idea is that information must have a physical representation. But I don't know how that would lead to a standardized mass of a byte.
No, you missed the point. See @[email protected]'s comment and link to Landauer's Principle, the namesake of which is literally named in the title of the post.
TL;DR: Storing information requires a change in entropy. A change in entropy requires a change in energy. There must be a minimum non-zero amount of energy required for a given quantity of information. Energy is mass due to mass-energy equivalence. ∴ information has mass independent of its physical representation.
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Entropy in information theory is equivalent to entropy in quantum dynamics / thermodynamics
i will Physically bitchslap you then you can deduce yourself the information about whether your face hurts or not, ayy lmao.
At least that's how I choose to interpret this new information
I’d give a source but it’s physically in my house and it’s heavy
Information is physical?
Information only exists in the world in the form of physical media, such as computer circuits, DNA or electrical/neuron pattern in your brain.
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Oh sure, throw a fit — just wait until you want to convert those units to kilojoules!
Who's laughing now, tablespoons?!
Hundred sextillion terabytes. Yeah, everybody of calling it hungry sex bites in minutes.
I have absolutely no understanding of whatever is said here
Metric appears to end at 10^30, but even then, I think the better way to phrase that number would be 5,000 quetta-bytes
Tera = 10^12; ~~Septillion~~ Sextillion = 10^21
Source
*500 000 quettabytes
*Sextillion = 10^21 ( = Zetta)
I'd recommend wikipedia here, your source seems to have taken 3 years to update their table and their image is still outdated.
They likely didn't use quetta because it was only added 3 years ago, and is still not widely known. Or maybe it sounded better.
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