Thursday, February 15, 2007

jeremy's believe it or not!: thumbs of steel edition

From an ESPN.com story about the heroic recruitment efforts of University of Illinois football coach Ron Zook:
At the very least, he out-BlackBerry'd them. ESPN's Mark Schlabach reported recently that Zook typed 95 million kilobytes' worth of text messages to recruits since Nov. 26. I'm surprised he has any thumbs left.
Yes: especially since, at one character per byte, typing 95 million kilobytes (a.k.a., 95 gigabytes) would work out to having typed more than 20,000 characters every second of every day since November 26th. If he was recruiting 100 prospects overall using this method, it would imply that each one received an average of around 4 million words per day. I hope all the recruits had unlimited data plans! Given the 160 character limit of many cel phones and a dime per message charge, all this txting would cost each athlete $81,000 a month.

4 comments:

Ken Houghton said...

I can't be the only one who suspects that should be 95,000 KB (or 95MM bytes) -- still majorly impressive.

Anonymous said...

This is great -- you should send it to Tony Kornheiser at ESPN's PTI show (or at his Washington Post email). He would love it and you might get mentioned on PTI. I realize that being mentioned on PTI might not mean as much to you as it would to me.

Shelley

jeremy said...

Ken: I have no idea what the real number is, just that it's unlikely to be within three orders of magnitude of 95GB.

Shelley: I sent my post link to the author of the ESPN article, with a "Not to question the accuracy of ESPN's reporting..." preface.

Anonymous said...

Despite the zillions of things on your to-do list, I am glad you had time to do these calculations. No, seriously, I'm glad, 'cause it's interesting and it's exactly what I would've done, but you saved me the time. Thanks.