february 25 rto
I'm hitting a bit of a wall. I've written a blog post every weekday since August 11. That's a lot of weekdays and a lot of words. Lately, though, there aren't enough words, not enough of the right words. "One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple," said Kerouac. I used to wonder if he ever did find the simple words. Now I know that those were the simple words.
In 2024, Scientific American ran a piece about how scientists had mapped one cubic millimetre of the human brain. Here's a pullquote:
The 3D map covers a volume of about one cubic millimetre, one-millionth of a whole brain, and contains roughly 57,000 cells and 150 million synapses β the connections between neurons. It incorporates a colossal 1.4 petabytes of data. βItβs a little bit humbling,β says Viren Jain, a neuroscientist at Google in Mountain View, California, and a co-author of the paper. βHow are we ever going to really come to terms with all this complexity?β
A petabyte is 1000 terabytes.
That's 1 000 000 000 000 000 bytes.
That's one quadrillion bytes.
One cubic millimetre/one millionth of the human brain incorporates 1.4 petabytes of data.
One quadrillion x a million x 1.4 is a 1 and then a 4 and then all the zeroes.
That is how complex human brains are. That is how that is how massively and unknowably complex the most boring person you've ever met is. That is how awesomely and incomprehensibly complex you and I are. For me, "finding the words" isn't about articulating simplicity, or, like, philosophical achievement. It's about understanding that you won't ever find the words if you don't look for them, and that you won't look for them if you don't know they exist, and that you won't know they exist until you set your motherfucker to receive and become finely attuned to the petabytes of frequencies inside of you.
π² gonna slep
πΌ go slep
π± touch sleeeeeppy
π³ grass slepppppppy
π· sleb
Be good to yourself.
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