Marshall Brain's Blog

Previous posts prompted two common questions from readers. This post on Reagan's funeral caused several people to ask, "Didn't pharoahs in Egypt have more expensive funerals than Reagan?" and this post caused several people to ask, "Are you sure that every phone call is not already being recorded?"

• Let's look at phone call recording first. Phone companies may already be recording every call... but my gut tells me it is still too expensive. If you assume that there are 200 million people in the U.S. using telephones, and they spend 20 minutes on the phone per day, and you assume a 4K byte/second encoding of their voices, then it would take about a petabyte (1,000 terabytes) per day to record their calls. It is still a major pain to create a petabyte drive array using today's technology. Creating a new petabyte drive array every day to record all the phone calls would, I think, be a bit much right now.
  
  I can remember in 1988 or so I had a friend who worked on a project that needed a 4 terabyte disk array. Standard "big" hard disks at that time were about a gigabyte. So he was going to use 4,000 drives. But the failure rate on the drives meant that several drives would be burning out per day. He was therefore having to arrange the drives into arrays (something like 32 drives in an array, with 4 drives per 32 for ECC, or something along those lines -- today you would do it with 8 drives in a RAID array and an extra parity drive), and then those 32 GB arrays were arranged into groups of 32, with 4 ECC arrays... And so on. It was nuts -- the amount of work you had to do to create a 4 terabyte array made that project nearly impossible in 1988.
  
  Now here we are 16 years later, and a 4 terabyte drive array is very easy. You can buy a dozen or so 300 GB drives, put them in a RAID array, and for $5,000 or so you are done. If you wait 5 or 10 more years, you will be able to buy a single drive that holds 4 terabytes for $300.
  
  I think if we wait 10 or 20 years, we will have petabyte hard disks (or some new solid-state form of mass-storage technology), and the technology will be cheap enough to allow phone companies to record every single phone call like they do with text messages today.
  
  
• On Reagan's funeral costs... The question is, "How much did it cost to build something like The Great Pyramid in Egypt?" I've seen a number of estimates indicating that it would have taken 5,000 men 20 years to build the Great Pyramid. Some say they were slaves, some think they were peasants paid in food... For our purposes let's assume they were paid the U.S. minimum wage. That works out to roughly $10,000 per year per worker. Multiply $10,000 by 5,000 men by 20 years, and it is $1 billion.
  
  If that is true, then Reagan's funeral cost as much as a pharoah's. But look what a pharoah got for his money -- The Great Pyramid! It's still one of the largest manmade structures on the planet and it has lasted 6,000 years! For the $1 billion we spent on Reagan's funeral, we got nothing.

Perhaps we should have built Ronald Reagan a gigantic concrete pyramid outside of Los Angeles or something...