Weekly Torah portion
Zettaflood
In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.Genesis 7:11 As the Torah tells us, at the dawn of human history, the flood swept the world. Most people, except for Noah and his family, drowned in that flood. Today, we too are drowning in a flood of a different kind—the informational flood. To put the current flood in perspective, consider this: according to one estimate in 2003, between the beginning of human civilization and the spread of computers, humanity generated cumulatively about 12 exabytes (12x1018 bytes) of data. However, in 2002 alone, we generated 5 exabytes of data. According to another estimate, [...]