10 September, 2008

Disney units

In a press release advertising our role in CERN's LHC experiments, my employer boasts that our project will generate 30 million Gigabytes of data per year, "the equivalent of 600,000 top-of-the-range iPods, which would cover over 500 tennis courts."

But campus only has six tennis courts, so they'd be covered by over 83 layers of iPods, or to a depth of 63.5 cm, or 70% of the height of the net. Something of a handicap to players.
Besides, I thought the traditional unit for physics experiments was the squash court.

There's science popularisation, and there's patronising bollocks. This seems dangerously close to the edge.