the.com/data
The exhaust of everything you do, refined into the fuel that runs the world.
means Facts, figures, and recorded observations—especially in a form a computer can store, process, or analyze.
from Latin all the way down: 'data' is the plural of 'datum,' meaning 'something given,' from 'dare,' to give. It entered English in the 1600s as a term in logic and math—the 'givens' of a problem, the premises you start from before reasoning further. The computing sense, where data became the raw stuff machines chew on, took over in the mid-20th century. Grammatical sticklers still argue whether 'data' is plural ('the data are') or a mass noun ('the data is'); the Latin says plural, but English increasingly disagrees.
- latin root
- Means a thing given, plural of datum
- daily output
- Humanity creates over 400 million terabytes each day
- dark data
- Most collected data is never analyzed at all
- new oil
- Worthless raw, priceless once refined and pointed somewhere
google search — processes over 8.5 billion searches per day
facebook user database — stores data on 3 billion monthly active users
human genome project — mapped all 3 billion base pairs of human dna, completed 2003
square kilometer array — radio telescope generating 1 exabyte of data daily in south africa and australia