In prehistoric times a mental lapse could have meant the difference between living to propagate your own particular embodiment of fitness or providing a tasty snack for a saber-toothed tiger. And in modern times the same rules apply, albeit in somewhat less dramatic fashion. Recently a friend of mine fell asleep behind the wheel of a car, and easily could have been killed. Psychologists have known for some time that the machinery of night served some critical housekeeping function, and that when they manage coerce some fiscally desperate student types into swearing off sleep for a week or so for the sake of the advancement of modern science, some pretty nutty things begin happening, such as erratic behavior, hallucinations and memory gaps, even moreso than college students typically experience. While I'm sure that it appreciates the sleep as well, there is nothing about the human body to indicate that it is unable to go 24-7, but it seems the mind is unequipped to face the world for more than a day or two at a time.
Lets talk about fractal compression.
A relatively new technique in the computer arena, some slick algorithms can take a digitized image and figure out where some pieces of it resemble others. The point here is that once you've recorded what a blade of grass looks like, there is no need to store two million copies to replicate a field, or for that matter, two. The result these new techniques can sometimes result in a 100 to 1 improvement in the size of the stored image with minimal quality degradation. While these compressed images can be reconstituted real-time, fractal compression is an example of an asymmetrical compression process. It takes a significantly longer time and greater computing horsepower to compress an image than it does to expand it.