Real-World Numbers

I'm not normally a math person. I hate numbers, so much that I'll write numbers out over using digits unless the number is more than three digits. (Writing 'eighty-nine' instead of '89', for example.) But every now and then I'll get the urge to work a simple calculation out purely for the fun of it. You can blame my senior year science teacher for this--in an effort to show us how big a number a million is, as well as how much BIGGER a BILLION is, he asked if we would be willing to sit at our desks for a million seconds for $1000. I was the only person smart enough to try and figure out how long that really WAS, and it came out to eleven and a half days I decided it might be worth it as long as I was allowed to get up every few hours to pee. Then he asked if we would do it for a BILLION seconds for $100,000--which ended up being a trick question because a billion seconds is over thirty years. That's a huge disparity!!

Since then it's been sort of weirdly entertaining to me to find out how much of X you would need for Y result--usually having to do with, as in the original exercise, demonstrating the mind-boggling size of millions and billions.

Today I worked out a few involving the comparatively modest million.

If you joined Facebook the day it went online on 4 February, 2004, you would have to have posted 343.7 updates a day, every day, for the last eight years in order to have racked up a million updates. It averages out to one update every fifteen seconds around the clock nonstop.

Assuming everybody lives--let's arbitrarily say--a very respectable eighty years, you, your children, your grandchildren, AND your great-grandchildren combined will not live for a million days. Combined you would only have lived 116,880 days.

A book containing a million pages of bible-paper-thin paper would be over eighty feet thick, or a third of the length of a Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet.

Maintaining a speed of 55mph (the 'national speed limit' in the US), it would take you seventeen minutes to drive one million inches. It's 15.8 miles. A million feet would take almost three and a half hours--it adds up to 189.4 miles, or slightly more than the distance between Tallahassee, Florida and Montgomery, Alabama.

Tangentially related: you get an extremely skewed perception of distance depending on what you were exposed to. An old joke goes, 'What's the difference between Americans and Europeans? Americans think a hundred years is a long time, and Europeans think a hundred miles is a long way.' Many of the states west of the Mississippi are bigger than whole COUNTRIES in Europe. If England were a state, it would rank 32nd in size; Ireland would be 42nd. Only Germany, France, Poland, and Sweden would be in the top five. It can be something of a huge shock to Europeans coming to the States for the first time to realize just how ENORMOUS it is.

To put it into perspective, there is more distance between Washington DC and New York City than there is between London and Brussels. There's more distance in Florida between Miami and Tallahassee than there is between London and Frankfurt. Yeah. Pretty trippy, huh?