Why We Did It

Every day, humanity produces billions of these.

And when one is worth keeping, we save it the way we save everything else. As a sound file.

That fart, just over one second long, takes up 107,800 bytes.

A longer one, in a big echoey cathedral, takes over 600,000.

Stored this way, a fart is bulky. You can't search it. You can't describe it. And frankly, it's disrespectful to the subject.

Yet anyone who hears one can describe it in a few words. How long. How high. How forceful. Wet, or dry. And what it was sitting on.

So we asked a simple question. If a person can describe a fart in a few words, can a computer store it in a few bytes?

The answer turned out to be twelve.

Hear the result for yourself, at fartbytes.com.