Don’t you agree that it is still a miracle how one can sit in comfortable chair somewhere on the other side of the World and read the words I’ve just wrote being thousands miles away? Have you ever thought of the true size of the WWW? Ever wondered just how many documents, images and other things are out there, all interlinked, intertwined, reciprocally referenced and available at a click of your mouse…
Well, “a lot” can be well underestimated. Since no one owns the web, there aren’t many to take the challenge to count just how many web pages there are out there. I googled this and even there it was not easy to find. And the figure I’ve discovered was in the frame of billions: it was estimated that there was 29.7 billion pages on the World Wide Web as of February 2007. And you are staring at one of them. Now – imagine that all of this wasteland of information has been accumulated in just 18 years of WWW existence?! Honestly, I do not envy historians of the future who will have to do “archaeological” research…
Why WWW has wormed its way into my travelogues? Well…mainly because just before our bus left Geneva for France, I managed to touch a real science…well, if not to touch then at least to catch a glimpse of her. I had a brief tour at CERN – a scientific institute – the European Organization for Nuclear Research, actually. And apart from visiting small local museum about technological wonders, I came across a place that looked like a backing for that classic movie about mad genius-scientists creating unbelievable wonders in the basement – some dark passage with exposed plumbing, rather ordinary to the eye, but in fact it leads into the enigma of multiple dimensions of virtuality. Apparently, CERN is where it all began in March 1989. And of course nobody cares about behind which laboratory’s door the wonder of the WWW did happen. But I came across this plague and I was amused. And that is why I wanted to share:
Well, “a lot” can be well underestimated. Since no one owns the web, there aren’t many to take the challenge to count just how many web pages there are out there. I googled this and even there it was not easy to find. And the figure I’ve discovered was in the frame of billions: it was estimated that there was 29.7 billion pages on the World Wide Web as of February 2007. And you are staring at one of them. Now – imagine that all of this wasteland of information has been accumulated in just 18 years of WWW existence?! Honestly, I do not envy historians of the future who will have to do “archaeological” research…
Why WWW has wormed its way into my travelogues? Well…mainly because just before our bus left Geneva for France, I managed to touch a real science…well, if not to touch then at least to catch a glimpse of her. I had a brief tour at CERN – a scientific institute – the European Organization for Nuclear Research, actually. And apart from visiting small local museum about technological wonders, I came across a place that looked like a backing for that classic movie about mad genius-scientists creating unbelievable wonders in the basement – some dark passage with exposed plumbing, rather ordinary to the eye, but in fact it leads into the enigma of multiple dimensions of virtuality. Apparently, CERN is where it all began in March 1989. And of course nobody cares about behind which laboratory’s door the wonder of the WWW did happen. But I came across this plague and I was amused. And that is why I wanted to share:
