In this section, we observe that over 1000 32bit ADD instructions can be executed by the Skiff with the same amount of energy it requires to send a single bit via wireless ethernet. This fact motivates the investigation of pre-transmission compression of data to reduce overall energy. Initial experiments reveal that reducing the number of bits to send does not always reduce the total energy of the task. This section elaborates on both of these points which necessitate the in-depth experiments of Section 3.3.