"Now, how long would it take the world to read them all out?

Reading 2×1046 tweets would take a person nearly 1047 seconds. It’s such a staggeringly large number of tweets that it hardly matters whether it’s one person reading or a billion—they won’t be able to make a meaningful dent in the list in the lifetime of the Earth.

Instead, let’s think back to that bird sharpening its beak on the mountaintop. Suppose that the bird scrapes off a tiny bit of rock from the mountain when it visits every thousand years, and it carries away those few dozen dust particles when it leaves. (A normal bird would probably deposit more beak material on the mountaintop than it would wear away, but virtually nothing else about this scenario is normal either, so we’ll just go with it.)

Let’s say you read tweets aloud for 16 hours a day, every day. And behind you, every thousand years, the bird arrives and scrapes off a few invisible specks of dust from the top of the hundred-mile mountain with its beak.

When the mountain is worn flat to the ground, that’s the first day of eternity.

The mountain reappears and the cycle starts again for another eternal day. 365 eternal days—each one 1032 years long—makes an eternal year.

100 eternal years, in which the bird grinds away 36,500 mountains, make an eternal century.

But a century isn’t enough. Nor a millennium.

Reading all the tweets takes you ten thousand eternal years.

That’s enough time to watch all of human history unfold, from the invention of writing to the present, with each day lasting as long as it takes for the bird to wear down a mountain."

So why is so much of Twitter not worth reading???

Just because you could read all of twitter doesn't mean it'd be a good idea to do so. There's so many books that have been published, but not all of them are considered literature and worthwhile reads. Like *ahem* Twilight, I have no idea how that one became so popular :(

Just because something's popular, does not necessarily mean you will like it.

It sounds like if Twitter had an editor who would only publish the 1 in 10,000 tweets that is worth reading, that reading all of THOSE tweets would still take forever.

Adam:  Be judicious in your choice of whom to follow on Twitter?  Or am I missing something?

Even if I'm judicious in who I read on Twitter, there are more tweets than I can possibly read.

It's best not to stress about it.

FWIW I judged Twilight *after* reading it...it'd been hyped as the next Harry Potter and curiosity killed the cat. Sparkly vampires and helpless teenagers just aren't my thing, whatever that says about me I accept wholeheartedly.

The movies were a definite improvement because we got to see a lot of Taylor Lautner.

Information Overload. And I'm of the opinion that eye candy is like real candy, too much somehow has to be bad for you.

Bad for you in that it rots your mind the way candy rots your teeth?

More or less. I remember hearing on the news about a study that showed that the more you stared in a mirror, the more unhappy you'd be afterwards. Eye candy's fun, but I imagine that somehow the subconscious internalizes the images of "idealized" hollywood bodies and then compares them to the image it sees in the mirror. The uptick of eating disorders doesn't happen in a vacuum, either. 

@Agnes I couldn't get into the love story to begin with, which is the whole point of the series and so it's probably why it never clicked for me. I just thought that if you've been alive for 100+ years or however old Edward is supposed to be it'd be unlikely for him to find a gloomy high school girl somehow interesting. Then again, I was bored with high school when I was in high school, and am kind of annoyed to find life's more like this than it should be sometimes:

Hey Agnes, I grew up on Disney Princesses, and I was fine with that fiction on the screen but wanted anything but a "happily ever after" for the characters in the books I read. Not sure why, just one of my quirks. 

I get that a lot of people liked Twilight, I just think there are a lot of really good books out there, and given that there's a limited time we get on this planet I'd prefer to spend it reading the better stuff :) 

For you, that can be Twilight, for me, The Hunger Games were my guilty fiction pleasure, since it was just as sappy :P