more iPod calamities for the anguaji household - my chunky monkey white 20GB iPod started emoting at me again the other week, this time it was the "Sad iPod" face - my mother thinks it's hilarious that an iPod can be sad - so i've sprung for the largest capacity flash-based-memory iPod i can afford, which is to say - a 32gb iPod touch off've (yes, again) eBay. some day, i'll have enough money to buy something decent first hand. until then, there's always eBay.
so i ran once again into the problem of trying to work out how much space there'd be on on a 32gb iPod. doing some quick maths in my head, i estimated that there would be a 6gb drop-off in the actual available space.
this calculation was unequivocally WRONG and it should be iterated over and over that i shouldn't be allowed to Do Maths by myself as it is DANGEROUS and MISLEADING and will probably result in WORLDFAIL. personally, i don't trust the art of numbers - everything in the world has a feeling to me, or a colour, or an abstraction. although working out 20% of 32gb felt right to me, it proved mightily, heart-achingly, wrong.
maybe i could usher in a new era of abstract mathematical expressionism. (myheart * 2 = ?/ life)
but i digress. here's the formula to work out the difference between theoretical hard drive space and actual hard drive space:
capacity * 0.93
dead easy. for drives over 1tb, it's * 0.91 which to me feels like there should be more available space, but i refuse to trust my almost non-existant maths instincts.
...you know, i had to study differential equations at Geek College. i remember the equation fine:
dy/dx = nax^(x-1)
it has a lovely rythym to it when you say it out loud. regardless, i got a different answer every time i did it, and actually can't remember what it was even calculating. but i do like to drop it into conversations that i studied Differential Equations.
i studied them in the same way that the ancients studied the stars, the gods or the birds in the sky, ie - from a great distance and mostly with a bemused expression - that is the knowledge that i keep to myself.
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incidentally, i'm thinking of switching to serif fonts for blog posts now that browsers treat curls with a hint of anti-aliased glee. thoughts and comments welcome.
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decided to revert to Trebuchet as Georgia is just too grown-up for my witterings.
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