Big Numbers
goodmath | May 4, 2010 I know that I just posted a link to a stupid religious argument, but I was sent a link to
another one, which I can't resist mocking.
As I've written about quite often, we humans really stink at
understanding big numbers, and how things scale.
href="http://thebeachnotes.blogspot.com/2010/05/tragedy-on-college-campuses.html">This
is an example of that. We've got a jerk who's about to graduate from a dinky
christian college, who believes that there must be something special
about the moral atmosphere at his college, because in his four years at the
school, there hasn't been a single murder…
goodmath | January 4, 2010 As you've surely heard by now, on christmas day, some idiot attempted to
blow up an airplane by stuffing his underwear full of explosives and then
lighting his crotch on fire. There's been a ton of coverage of this - most of
which takes the form of people running around wetting their pants in terror.
One thing which I've noticed, though, is that one aspect of this whole mess
ties in to one of my personal obsessions: scale. We humans are really,
really lousy at dealing with big numbers. We just absolutely
have a piss-poor ability to really comprehend numbers, or to take what we
know, and put…