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I spend some time on a treadmill and watch TV to distract myself from the display that shows elapsed time, distance, and supposed calories burned (it also shows speed, incline, and pulse rate). Every once in a while I'd figure I didn't have much more to go and then, a bit later look again and see that I still hadn't reached the point I thought I was about to pass. The first time this happened I dismissed it as a fluke. The second time, as a coincidence. But it kept on happening. Flukes and coincidences don't keep on happening.
I eventually realized what was going on. I saw one number, or part of one number, and took it for another. Time and distance aren't counted the same way. Distance is truly decimal, so 1.50 means I'm halfway to 2.00 for whatever the distance measure is. Time is not truly decimal, but sexagesimal. 2:50 isn't halfway to 3:00, but 0:10 to 3:00. That's where the confusion came in. I saw X:50 and psychologically (wishful thinking, perhaps?) that became "I'm almost to the next marker." But I saw the distance indication and treated it as if it were time. Then later I'd see that the distance hadn't reached the next marker and was still further away than I had thought. Oops. Now that I know that was going on, I don't expect to have the problem anymore. I do wonder if I would had run into this issue had the display, which shows two numbers at once, had been set up to show time in one place and distance in another.
Suppose you have a device that can display bits, or pixels. To make it simple each pixel can be only on or off, white or black, no grays and no color. If each pixel is a bit, the whole display can be represented, or is a representation of, one long binary number. If you make that number 0, display it, add one, display it, and keep adding one and displaying until the binary number has gone from all zeroes to all ones then the display will eventually show you everything it ever could.
Everything. It'd be in high contrast, but it'd be there. Every scene that could be, real or fictional. Every page of every book. Every newspaper headline of the New York Times.. and the National Enquirer.. and the Onion. Everything you ever did. Everything you never did. And the same for neighbors and strangers. Next week's winning lottery numbers. Next week's losing lottery numbers - all of them. There are a few problems. One is that most of things it will show you will be garbage. What isn't garbage will be impossible or at least very hard to distinguish from garbage. Supposing you do see tomorrow's headline how can you be sure it's fact or fiction?
But the real deal-killer of this is that there just isn't enough time to do it. If the display is a very modest 10 x 10 pixels, little more than the size of a character, already the binary number is 100 bits long. That's 2 to the 100th power combinations, or 1.267.. x 10 to the 30th. Supposing an add and display rate of 1000 times per second - too fast to see individual images - and then figuring in 60 seconds per minute and 60 minutes per hour, and 24 hours per day, and 365.25 days per year (on average - remember leap years) and 1000 years per millennium...that's still 4 x 10 to the 17th millennia. For any really usable size display, say 100 x 100 pixels, the time requirements are even more staggering.
