This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better.
Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.
To any future monthly posters of SQ threads, please remember to add the "stupid_questions" tag.
Here I be, looking at a decade old Kurzweil book, and I want to know whether the trends he's graphing hold up after in later years. I have no inkling of where on earth one GETs these kinds of factoids, except by some mystical voodoo powers of Research bestowed by Higher Education. It's not just guesstimation... probably.
Bits per Second per Dollar for wireless devices? Smallest DRAM Half Pitches? Rates of adoption for pre-industrial inventions? From whence do all these numbers come and how does one get more recent collections of numbers?
LW user Stuart Armstrong did a number of posts assessing Kurzweil's predictions: Here, here, here, and here.