Kaorimoch writes, "Perhaps a better term would be "Counting the people on the internet"? That weighing stuff is for things with, well, MASS."

Hobotron also makes this point: "Bad sample population, low sample size with ONE DAY, NO inclusion of error propagation across statistical barriers. When you multiply estimates, you multiply error as well."

These and other great comments from the slashdot crowd really got me to thinking that my thouroughly researched scienterrific study really missed the boat.

Not typically one to miss the opportunity to futher the advancement of literal interpretation of analogy and armchair statistics, I leave you with the following thought.

If we assume that the average internet user weighs 150 pounds (with a standard deviation of 100), we find that the actual weight of the internet meatspace is 78 billion pounds.

Google currently indexes over 8 billion pages, so that's about a tenth of a page per pound of internet meat.

In the last 5 years, the internet has grown by about 2 billion pages, or about 1.1 million pages a day. So it takes about 71 thousand pounds of meat a day to create one page. And we know most of those pages to be crap.

You need about 13.3 calories a day to support a pound of meat, so that works out to 944,300 calories a day of online meat to produce a single page. That's almost 1.1 kilowatt hours spent making a single page of crap. This is just the energy used by the internet meatspace!

So, in conclusion, if you find this as appallingly inefficient as I do, please go write something yourself.

And do it quickly!

If you want to write something fantastic, please make an account here on BlogCadre and post away. I can't promise you'll be a better person for it, but you'll be doing your part to increase the thought to wasted meat ratio.

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