Comments on: The bizarrest email I’ve ever received

By: penguat

penguat — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 23:12:45 +0000

A hard drive, will be (theoretically) heavier when it is in a more energetic state. So if one of the states is more energetic the drive will weigh more, according to (a corrected form of) E = mc^2.

can’t be sure: unless something actually evaporates or is physically removed, a written CD would be the same mass. I think it just alters the surface (chemically?) so that it reflects differently.

By: can't be sure

can't be sure — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 16:59:45 +0000

Surely a written CD-R is LIGHTER than a blank one, if the laser cuts grooves into the media in order to record data?

In the same way a carved stone tablet ought to be lighter than a blank one?

By: William Watson

William Watson — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 11:19:11 +0000

This reminds me of a little old lady I overheard at a vegetable stall in Guildford market in the 70’s.
“4 lbs of potatoes, please. And can you choose small ones for me ‘cos I’ve got to carry them up the hill”

By: Peter Ashley

Peter Ashley — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 17:07:29 +0000

Hi Tim

Re. Your Blog. Everyone knows a full hard drive is heavier than an empty one – it contains many more BITS.

All the best, I’m back to the sanatorium now.

Peter

Peter J S Ashley
Computer Engineer and keen PC Pro Reader/Subscriber with a questionable sense of humour

By: How heavy is your data? « Storage News

How heavy is your data? « Storage News — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 21:06:19 +0000

[...] heavy is your data? PC Pro received a funny question: just how heavy is the data on your disk [...]

By: Eltee

Eltee — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 20:42:20 +0000

Information has to be massless – otherwise it cannot travel at lightspeed. However, Government information definitely has mass, which is why they lose it quite frequently – it falls off the cables under the influence of gravity!!

By: Twitter Trackbacks for The bizarrest email I’ve ever received | PC Pro blog [pcpro.co.uk] on Topsy.com

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:30:01 +0000

[...] The bizarrest email I’ve ever received | PC Pro blog http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2009/08/24/the-bizarrest-email-ive-ever-received – view page – cached I was having quite a bad day, if I’m honest, but then this dropped into my inbox: Hiya – This is a slightly odd question, but I’m hoping you may be able to — From the page [...]

By: Steve Cassidy

Steve Cassidy — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 08:49:34 +0000

Notice how nobody is taking about their weirdest emails? I think we need a few more rules to make this really work. No Spam mails; no links to frat-house “man, that’s sick” photo-galleries; it has to be part of a real conversation. I am tempted to further limit the field by suggesting that friends or contacts who go a bit David Icke should also be excluded, just to up the ante a bit… to fit those constraints, I once got a mail asking if I could write a program to virtually sort gold bars int othe most cost-efficient shipment sizes, because the bloke who did it with a blackboard and a big weighing machine had pulled a muscle in his shoulder, and the deliveries were stacking up…

By: hjlupton

hjlupton — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 22:09:08 +0000

I agree that nothing should be added or taken away by adding data to the drive. However, if it is even remotely possible that adding data affects the magnetic field of the drive, then any difference (however small) may have an effect on the drive’s interaction with the earth’s magnetic field.

putting it another way, the drive’s mass is almost certainly constant regardless of data loading, but as weight is a measure of gravity’s effect on a mass, then maybe just maybe a very tiny weight difference may occur. I’m speaking purely hypothetically though.

think of it like this, if you stand in a lift that is going down, you weigh less than if it was stationary but your mass remains constant.

i would like to say that there is no difference between empty and full hard drives, but i’ve seen so much crazy stuff on discovery channel lately that i’m open to the possibility.

By: Simon Peters

Simon Peters — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 19:52:48 +0000

I would think that physically speaking an ‘empty’ drive still contains the same amount of magnetic information as a ‘full’ hard drive – the only difference being that data ; being an ordered sequence of digits magnetically on the hard disk differs only in sequence rather than weight. A cd is the same weight written or unwritten – although cds are optical media – surely the initial blank mass can not be increased – simply rearranged into data!