Half a croissant, on a plate, with a sign in front of it saying '50c'
h a l f b a k e r y
On the one hand, true. On the other hand, bollocks.

idea: add, search, annotate, link, view, overview, recent, by name, random

meta: news, help, about, links, report a problem

account: browse anonymously, or get an account and write.

user:
pass:
register,


                                               

Pizza Marghedata

Store data with small blobs of cheese and tomato
  (+8)(+8)
(+8)
  [vote for,
against]

This is not going to be the biggest capacity storage device ever conceived.

Take a pizza base covered in tomato puree. Take any computer-controlled cheese gun you might have lying around and position it along a radial beam while rotating the pizza on a turntable. Squirt cheese for a one, don't for a zero. Compress the data, then store them the way they'd be stored on a hard drive (i.e. the edge thing, can't remember details), read them back by using a microscope and a bright white light. This is a constant angular velocity pizza of course.

nineteenthly, Oct 03 2011

"Take any computer-controlled cheese gun you might have lying around..." Cheese_20sputtering_20gun
[hippo, Oct 03 2011]

5 1/4" Pizza Oven http://web.archive...._2f4_20Pizza_20Oven
[hippo, Oct 03 2011]

[link]






       // constant angular velocity pizza of course //   

       [marked-for-tagline]   

       Perhaps you could store a message like "Your dinner is ready"...   

       [+]
8th of 7, Oct 03 2011
  

       It makes no sense for the angular velocity to be constant - you'd be able to acheive much higher data densities by adjusting the angular speed depending on the head position to make the linear speed of the track beneath the head constant.
hippo, Oct 03 2011
  

       //Marghedata// Quattro Formaggi would be better, as you should be able to get higher compression ratios if you allow for each bit to have 4 different cheese "states" (mozzarella, stracchino, fontina, gorgonzola ) which could be identified by some kind Chromatographic Mass Spectrometry analysis, albeit you'd probably only be able to do this once - making this device a write-many read-once storage medium, unless anyone in the lab mistakes it for a pizza, in which case, it would be a write-many, eat-once storage medium.
zen_tom, Oct 03 2011
  

       sp. purée
pocmloc, Oct 03 2011
  

       Might explain the truth behind why HAL was singing ¨Daisy¨
Dub, Oct 03 2011
  

       [zen_tom], a multi-layer technique could deliver higher data density on the same substrate (deep pan for us, please).
8th of 7, Oct 03 2011
  

       Good point [8th] and for the more security minded folks, a calzone format would provide an initial layer of protection.
zen_tom, Oct 03 2011
  

       If you have guests, a RAID array might be appropriate
hippo, Oct 03 2011
  

       If you have small guests, a MINI version might be appropriate.   

       Alternately, by adopting different herb fillings, chicken kievs (or mini-kievs for the small form factor adherents) might be employed for data packet transmission - you'd just have to attach the right labels to each "packet"-kiev prior to sending them on to the next routing station. CKP/IP = Chicken Kiev Protocol / Internet Protocol
zen_tom, Oct 03 2011
  

       Also, pizza data encoding has access to a range of data symbols so it seems a mistake to use binary for the storage medium. Octal storage (0=cheese, 1=anchovy, 2=mushroom, 4=pepperoni, 5= black olive, 6=prosciutto, 7=green olive) should quadruple the data density.
hippo, Oct 03 2011
  

       True, [hippo], but the data loss from picking off the anchovies would be a serious problem.
MechE, Oct 03 2011
  

       That could be solved by using Chorizo Relocation Compensation (CRC) on each track.
8th of 7, Oct 03 2011
  

       (Fromage And Tomato)
hippo, Oct 03 2011
  

       What will the total capacity be, in bites, assuming a 5.25 inch form factor ?   

       Presumaby both soft- and hard-sectored formats will be available, requiring the availability of a pizza cuttin wheel.
8th of 7, Oct 03 2011
  

       On reflection, i think quattro formaggi would indeed more than double the data density, and that it would require a four-barrelled cheese gun, which has got to be a good thing.
nineteenthly, Oct 03 2011
  

       or for more steganography, burn the data into the top layer of the dough, and then throw off the competition with a bogus layer of toppings that'll spend forever trying to decode.
not_morrison_rm, Oct 03 2011
  

       Far higher data densities could be achieved by using a cheesecake covered with hundreds & thousands.
DrBob, Oct 04 2011
  

       What bothers me is that the number of possible toppings is a prime number, which reduces the data density. I've been trying to come up with a solution to this, and here's my suggestion: tomato is still zero but the quattro formaggi are all very different in colour, e.g. blue cheese, mozzarella, red Leicester and mature cheddar, then they get melted together in different quantities, then a spectrographic analysis is done to read the data. I envisage a total of maybe three different levels per cheese including none, giving the cheese gun a bandwidth of around six bits. The hardest part would be telling the difference between the reddish cheese and the tomato. Certain combinations could be avoided because of their similarity to others, but that would just involve tweaking of quantities. However, even that would be wasteful because there are nearly seven dozen possibilities.   

       Calculating total data capacity and assuming a pizza one cubit in diameter with a millicubit resolution for the data, without compression, that would allow almost four gross kilobytes.
nineteenthly, Oct 04 2011
  

       With a side of memory breadsticks, please. [+]
swimswim, Oct 04 2011
  

       It would be reassuring to know that the system has been thoroughly de-bugged ...
8th of 7, Oct 04 2011
  

       What, the Borg don't like Madagascar Cockroaches on their pizza?
Alterother, Oct 04 2011
  
      
[annotate]
  


 

back: main index

business  computer  culture  fashion  food  halfbakery  home  other  product  public  science  sport  vehicle