ONE of the problems with the global financial crisis is that the sums of money being discussed are so huge it is difficult to get one’s head round them. Attempts by the media to help us conceptualise the figures don’t always make it any easier.
Take a blog entry entitled by Zephyr Teachout on TechPresident.com. It aims to give explanatory equivalents of the amount of money pumped into Wall Street in the US government’s financial bailout earlier this month. Josh Frank, who alerted us to this, asks if it is really helpful to be told that: “It is almost 3 billion nonrefundable bus fares from Durham [North Carolina] to San Francisco, leaving tomorrow.”
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The answer is no, it isn’t very helpful. Even the relatively small number of people who have taken this trip and know the cost of the fare are not going to be much the wiser, because visualising 3 billion is barely easier than visualising 700 billion. Not only that, why muddy the water with “nonrefundable” and “leaving tomorrow”?
Nor is it helpful to many people to be told “It is 7000 times bigger than the Sierra club’s yearly budget”. How many people know what the Sierra Club environmental group’s budget is? And how much better off are we when we are told “It could pay for 2000 McDonald’s apple pies for every single American”?
One comparison does at least bring home the enormity of the sums involved. When it is fully written out, Teachout tells us, 700 billion contains “more zeros than the calculator that comes with my computer allows”.
MARMITE yeast extract – the savoury spread that many British people adore and everyone else finds revolting – has attempted to update its image by boasting on the jar that it is “100% vegetarian”. This set Matt Walters wondering if there is any sort of vegetarian apart from 100 per cent: would it make any sense to say that something was 90 per cent vegetarian?
Take beef steaks, for example. Uncooked, , which vegetarians don’t mind ingesting. So you could, if you wanted, say that beef steaks are 70 per cent vegetarian. But you wouldn’t, would you?
Feedback, as it happens, is extremely fond of Marmite, especially on toast, but nevertheless suggests that the company drop the “100%…” slogan forthwith on the grounds that it is absurd, and replaces it with the perfectly adequate, if less punchy, “Suitable for…”.
ACCORDING to , “Astronomers may have discovered the relative of a freakishly behaving exploding star…” Julian Moore says he was less impressed by this discovery than by the instruments employed in making it. The investigators, apparently, searched “through data from 18 different telescopes, both ground- and space-based, nearly all of which existed”.
Moore wants to know which telescopes did not exist, and how the researchers obtained the data from them. “We must be told,” he says. “The power of this approach should not be underestimated. The more non-existent telescopes accessed, the more data can be obtained. Perhaps by combining the data from a number of widely separated non-existent telescopes, images of otherwise unachievable resolution might be achieved.”
“On the envelope of a discount subscription offer that Time magazine sent John Belcher were the words: “TIME – DO NOT BEND”
Moore adds that he is disappointed that CERN – “which one would expect to be at the forefront of applied quantum mechanics” – has not seen fit to use some non-existent detectors on the Large Hadron Collider. “I see no reason in principle why these non-existent detectors should not be used to examine non-existent collisions in non-existent beams until the LHC starts up again.”
IT IS surprising how big a mistake you can make by misinterpreting two little letters. In its 8 September issue, Aviation Week & Space Technology mentions an imaging spectrometer with “spectrum resolution of 5 nautical miles”.
Richard Olsen notes in a letter to the magazine on 22 September that it might be more appropriate to translate the abbreviation “n.m.” as “nanometres” rather than “nautical miles”, bearing in mind that “An imaging spectrometer typically has a spectral resolution of 5 to 19 nanometres.” The units differ by 12 orders of magnitude.
FINALLY, Ken Sacks recently purchased a petrol-powered machine which came with a message displayed on the cover of the operator’s manual. It said: “Important: This engine is not equipped with a spark arrester muffler. It is a violation of California Public Resource Code section 4442 to use or operate the engine on any forest-covered, brush-covered, or grass-covered land. Other states or federal areas may have similar laws.”
Sacks is thoroughly flummoxed. The machine in question is a garden lawnmower.
