My son and daughter taking a walk in the forest

There’s an experiment attributed to Harry Harlow. Five monkeys are placed in a cage, with a ladder and a banana hanging from the ceiling. Whenever a monkey climbs the ladder to grab the banana, all monkeys are sprayed with ice cold water. After a few times, monkeys know better and nobody tries climbing the ladder.

Then, one monkey is replaced. The new arrival wants to get the banana, but as soon as he climbs the ladder, the other four start beating him – they want to stay warm and dry. After a few attempts, the new monkey conforms to the group and stays down. Then, another monkey is replaced and the story repeats itself – when the monkey that was never sprayed with cold water joins the other three. And so on until there is no monkey left who was sprayed with cold water, but still the new arrival gets beaten when he tries to climb the ladder.

Now, the decision was made by team members long gone. There’s nobody on the current team who made the decision, and nobody knows why the decision was made. It just gets passed to the new team members, with no questions asked. It may have been a good decision when it was made, and it may still be a good decision now.

But if you ask “why are we doing this” and the only answer is “the decision was made before we got here”, form your own opinion and don’t be afraid to question the status quo.

From Weaving textures set.

I remember back in late 90s, just after the invention of DVD, somebody said – never underestimate the carrying capacity of a semi truck trailer loaded with floppy disks. I never did the math though, so here goes:

A typical semi truck trailer is 12.5x8x40 feet which gives 4000 cubic feet. This is 113,267,386 cubic centimeters. A floppy disk is 3.5 inch across, which would be 8.75 centimeters. Assuming thickness of 4 millimeters (it’s actually a little bit less), each floppy is 30.625 cubic centimeters.

So a semi can carry almost 3.7 million floppy disks (3,698,526) which amount to 5,201 GB or 5.07 TB of data. Looks like that guy was right.

Update: a comment pointed out an earlier quote about a station wagon loaded with 9 track tapes. 2400 feet 9-track tape is a 10.5 inch reel. Assuming thickness of 0.5 inch that amounts to 860 cubic centimeters. With folded rear seats, Audi A4 has 50.5 cubic feet of cargo space. That is 1,430,000 cubic centimeters. That amounts to 1662 9-track tapes.

Each tape holds 170MB (IBM 3400 series). All in all 275 GB

Update 2: Chevrolet Caprice has cargo capacity of 106.4 cubic feet. Filled with 9-track tapes would be 581 GB.