Bandwidth

Some back of the envelope style calculations:

You have 10 billion nerve cells in your brain, with an average of 10,000 synapses per nerve cell. Each of these fires about 100 times a second, within an order of magnitude. If each firing carries one bit of information, this puts the bandwidth of your brain to around 10 quadrillion bits every second or about a petabyte per second.

Compare that to the bandwidth of the internet, which in 2004 was a mere 4,200 petabytes per year, or just 141 gigabytes/second. That is, in 2004, the amount of data transferred on the entire internet is just 0.0135% the bandwidth going on in an average person.

If we're being extremely optimistic and assuming that the internet will double its bandwidth every year, then it will take roughly 13 years for the internet to reach the bandwidth of a single human brain, and another 35-ish years to reach the thinking power of the world's population.

These calculations aren't entirely fair (not to mention horribly inexact) for a lot of reasons. In particular, there is a lot of error in both directions: the internet isn't going to grow that fast, and the human brain has a lot of redundancy. Regardless, fun talking point.

Excerpt

... known that it is no coincidence that the sign for integration ∫ matches the contour of the Taijitu's interior, nor that the limits of integration were placed at the seeds of the other, the dual centers toward which both yin and yang are inextricably drawn. Leibniz, ever the sinophile, knew that motion and stasis were linked through the slope of time, that change could be captured in a single stroke...

Unfortunately, Leibniz ignored the most crucial point, that the whole is often far more than the limit of sums, and often far less...