How Fast Are You?

What’s In a Name?

The full and proper name of this website is “How Fast Are You? How Dense?” (sometimes abbreviated as HFAYHD) and reading the explanation of what the name means is kind of like having a joke explained to you: by the time you’ve heard the entire explanation, you get why it was supposed to be funny, but that time is now long past. Having said that, what follows attempts to explain why this website is called “How Fast Are You? How Dense?”, and by the time you finish reading it, you will probably understand why it has such a obtuse and grammatically inappropriate name, but you will almost certainly no longer care. Plunging onward:

Once upon a time, in a far off land called “The 80’s”, there was a magazine called Mondo 2000. It was the coolest thing ever. It covered a future full of wearable computers and smart-drugs and virtual reality and everything that was going to turn us all into gloriously posthuman cyborgs that lived and breathed information. And this future had just arrived, this very minute, and minds and bodies would never be the same. In a word, it talked about cyberpunk.

This herald of the “future now” (Mondo) had a tag line: “How fast are you? How dense?”¹ This, also, was the coolest thing ever. In the darkly dystopian future that was due any second now, we gloriously posthuman cyborgs would be using this as a recognition signal, a handshake protocol. We would greet everyone with a demand for bandwidth specification: How much information can you provide me with? How quickly can you accept the information that I have to impart? Because us cyborgs need information like a fish needs water, and I don’t have time for niceties.

This site attempts to provide you, the reader, with interesting information at as high a bitrate as our day jobs allow. Because you and us, we’re all are gloriously posthuman cyborgs, and we’re living in the cyberpunk future. For example:

Wearable computers? That cellphone in your pocket has more computing power than 3,600 desktop computers from The 80’s and is probably connected to the Internet, a massively interconnected system of billions of computers and providing a medium through which billions of people and companies work and play.

Smart-drugs? In a survey of 1,427 scientists, 62% percent said they had taken drugs like Ritalin, and 44% reported using Provigil, to improve their mental performance. It is estimated that 7-20% of college students have taken drugs like Ritalin and Adderall for the same reason.

Virtual reality? Look no further than Second Life, World of Warcraft, or any of the other dozens of virtual locations where meet to play, socialize and create.

So, welcome to the future. Now, how fast are you? How dense?

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