Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Just the Facts, Ma'am


I heard recently that the amount of information in the world doubles every two years. I don't know if this is true, but it seems possible.

Faced with this, people often have difficulty in sorting the wheat from the chaff. What matters? What's true? What information can I trust?

Fortunately, there's a great source of simple information about scientific matters, including health. Sense About Science doesn't claim to cover everything but it does have good and easy-to-read information about Bird Flu, Detox, MMR, Radiation (mobile phones) and many other topics.

Just click the picture above to have a read - and make sense of the information deluge.

4 comments:

Cathryn said...

Not to get too mystical on you, but maybe all the information is there and we're just uncovering it and talking about it at a regularly doubling rate.

Sean said...

Well, maybe. I wondered about this factoid (is that the right use of factoid?). However there are things like the Large Hadron Collider which generate vast amounts of data when working. Digital photographs. And just millions of people every month who are increasingly able to record things that previously would have been lost. Like blogs.

Cathryn said...

Blogs are doubling the amount of recorded information every six months!

Craig said...

Cathryn may be onto something.

But either way, the book is brilliant.