It’s shameful when politicians try to cultivate fear with spurious statistics. This article from The Atlantic shows the longer-term trend is clearly one of improvement. People, the world is not so scary as they would have you believe.
The Greek Theatre in the Sicilian town of Taormina could, so they say, accommodate 5000 theatre-goers. Could this be true? Let’s do some rough and ready calculations …
http://www.andrewcaelliott.com/explorations/2016/11/13/a-trip-to-the-theatre
IsThatABigNumber.com is about extending our number sense. We make comparisons that are (mostly) down-to-earth: populations of people and animals, national budgets, river lengths and so on.
But when we leave behind everyday experience and look at the kind of numbers you find in astronomy and in combinatorics, we come across vastly bigger numbers.
One strategy to grasp these numbers is to break them down into a series of levels, to see them as stupidly big aggregations of things that are themselves stupidly big aggregations of … Here are some good clips illustrating this:
Cute video featuring nine ways to visualise 1 in a million. Interesting that five of the nine ways involve the use of an intermediate grouping. For example, 100 people have an average of 100,000 hairs on their heads. 10 hairs represents 1 in a million. 4 of the comparisons are direct, eg 1 word in all of the text of the Harry Potter novels.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aa-m8a-jZ0k
How many tennis balls does it take to fill St Paul’s?