Some, like mathematician Roger Antonsen, believe numbers are the key to understanding the world. (Antonsen is great TED talk To explain this statement, which I highly recommend.) And there’s a Reddit thread that vividly illustrates the point.
It started when I was a platform user Justin MGH make postasks others to share facts and statistics that sound like obvious exaggerations but aren’t really.
Soon, people began providing fascinating, bizarre, and even disturbing bits of information that changed each other’s perspectives on everything around them, even if only slightly.
The budget to send a Curiosity rover to Mars is less than the world’s military budget for 13 hours
The difference between 1 million and 1 billion is (relatively) large.
1 million seconds = 11 days
1 billion seconds = 31 years
The original height of Mount Everest was calculated to be exactly 29,000 feet high, but to avoid the impression that the exact height of 29,000 feet was just a rounded estimate, the official height was 29,002 feet. Declared to be feet.
Neutron stars are so dense that if you drop a gummy bear from 1 meter away, it will hit the surface with the force of 1,000 nuclear bombs in 1 microsecond.
Silent Films Lost More Than They Saved
We live in a time when all is saved, and it is not hard to imagine the loss of so much creative material. Even in the 1970s, many films are lost.
You can walk from North Korea to Norway, passing through only one country.
Also, my feet hurt a little.
According to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, until 2003, humans were creating as much information every other day as once every two days.