The Internet: Moving at the Speed of a Very Fast Snail or Very Slow Spider

Traveling at just one-thirteenth the speed of a slow news day...

Like everyone of a certain age, I fondly recall those old commercials featuring pre-teen Anna Paquin wearing Mrs. Dewson-caliber hats and talking about something called the "Information Superhighway" -- though it sounded much better in her youthful, Kiwi accent.

Nearly 20 years later, Paquin sure has grown up -- and so has this "Information Superhighway." I don't need to go into depth on how radically the Internet has altered our world -- perhaps I could pony up five bucks to get some of my out-of-work newspaper colleagues to explain how that went for them. In any event, the speed that information -- or misinformation -- can spread worldwide is truly staggering.

So it was a bit of a shock late yesterday when I saw a breaking news bulletin on the Chico News and Review Web page announcing that San Francisco had adopted the nation's most draconian composting laws. In today's digital, 24-hour news cycle, checking e-mail on your phone in the elevator-age, this breaking item managed to report San Francisco's composting legislation a mere five weeks after its adoption. This isn't news at the speed of light or even the speed of sound. Consider that Chico is 173 miles away and the news went from here to there and back in 38 days. That's 346 miles in 912 hours or 0.38 miles (2,003 feet) per hour.   

How fast is this, relatively? Well, it's remarkably fast -- for a snail. A snail's average speed is just 0.03 miles per hour, meaning this news traveled from San Francisco to Chico and back at a velocity roughly 13 times a snail's pace.

On the other hand, the reporting speed of this story is only a little more than double the ground speed of a three-toed sloth (0.15 mph) or a giant tortoise (0.17 mph). And the spider you see scurrying up and down your wall would be able to race from San Francisco to Chico and back in 295.7 hours. That's around 12 days and eight hours -- three times faster than this composting story!

These animal-based calculations, by the way, will grow extraordinarily complicated when applied to (very) late-breaking stories about Jonathan Sanchez' no-hitter, which I'm sure will be trickling in from the Web over the next couple of days. How long did it take the news to travel from AT&T Park to some Web site housed in, say, Bombay, and then back to my computer -- located 300 feet, tops, from the pitcher's mound at AT&T? Can I get a wombat's speed into the equation? We'll see.

Photo   |   Jürgen Schoner