My desktop system houses a monstrous amount of audio files, which I sometimes imagine to be about the size of a brontobyte. That is not a term approved under the International System of Units but some references on the Web suggest its numerical representation is a '1' followed by 27 zeros. A brontobyte has also been described as worth a million, million petabytes, enough to store - with interest - everything that's ever been filmed, taped, photographed, recorded, written and spoken.

The obvious reasons why files we use are ballooning include to keep up with the social malaise known as 'growth fetish' and to handle all the spam about various kinds of 'enhancements' we receive. If only I could send my audio-file collection to a digital fat camp to work out with bloated Tiffs and Mpegs. It desperately needs to shed some bytes because I must move it to another computer. My flash drive cannot do the job because: a) it can only handle 256 megabytes and b) oops, I left it in a Phuket cybercafe.