Pictures Of "U"

What you're reading right now is a "text file." Essentially, it's a list of numbers, with each number representing a letter.  That may seem like a lot of numbers, but keep in mind that computers can store an astounding quantity of numbers; a gigabyte is essentially a billion numbers.  Looking at it that way, you realize that text files are downright insignificant for modern computers.

Now consider this picture of antique pig statuettes:

There are different ways of storing graphics, but most involve one or more numbers for each pixel, to describe the colour of that pixel.  There's usually some sort of mathematical trick to shorten that big list of numbers, but even if that trick can reduce the list by 90%, that's still a big list of numbers.  If you compare the number of letters in this post to the number of pixels in the picture, you'll realize that pictures take up far more space in a computer than text.

Go ahead, do your "picture is worth a thousand words" joke now.  I'll resist the temptation to point out that it's far more than a thousand in this case. Why am I taking you through Computer Principles 101? Consider the possibility of a picture of words.

It may seem to you that this is no different than the words around it.  But it's quite different for the computer.  The text you're reading now was shipped across the Internet letter by letter, then drawn on your screen by your web browser.  The picture of the words was drawn on my computer, then shipped to you, pixel by pixel.  The amounts aren't large in the grand scheme of things, but I'm always amazed at how many people don't realize that one is orders of magnitude larger than the other.

I first noticed it in university, when a physics professor posted the answers to a quiz on the web in the form of a huge scan of a printed page.  This was over twenty years ago, when such a large file choked the pitiful computers in the undergrad lab.  I couldn't figure out how he typed up the answers on a word processor, printed them out, and ran them through a scanner without thinking there had to be an easier way.

This misunderstanding about computers has reappeared from time to time, and the latest instance is on Twitter.  Of course, Twitter is weird in a lot of ways, but none more than the self-imposed and totally arbitrary 140 character limit.  The concept of posting graphics with your tweets was added later on, despite the fact that the pictures are much bigger than tweets.  And next thing you know, the graphics capability has become a way of overcoming the character limit; when people want to quote a larger amount of text, they can attach a picture of it to their tweet. Of course, for many people this inefficient way of communicating is not a problem. But when I'm stuck using a slower connection, it's hard to believe this is how we send text across the Net.