Landmark Numbers and Bad Number Analogies
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- čas přidán 24. 08. 2020
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Watch Tim Harford talk about the Stork-Baby correlation on Numberphile:
• Statistics, Storks, an...
Here is the current Landmark Number recommended toolkit (yours may differ).
- population of the country you live in
- 'people days' per year in your countries of choice
- GDP or total government budget
- heigh of some buildings you have seen
- a human lifetime is around 30,000 days
- million/billion/trillion seconds
More about Tim Harford:
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Huge thanks to The Vintage Red Bus Company for lending us one of their fantastic buses.
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"Asteroid the size of a bus hurtles past Earth"
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CORRECTIONS:
- We were in front of a long version of the original Routemaster bus which I believe was technically 29.91 feet, but we were told 30 feet and that is an easier unit of measurement.
- Let me know if you spot any mistakes!
Thanks to my Patreons who mean I can hire a bus and then pay someone to animate a dinosaur walking behind it. Here is a random subset of those fine Patreon People:
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Morgan Butt
Alan H.
Kragar
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As always: thanks to Jane Street who support my channel. They're amazing.
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Additional camerawork by Ben Westaway
Animations by William Marler www.wmad.co.uk/
Music by Howard Carter
Audio by Peter Doggart
Design by Simon Wright and Adam Robinson
MATT PARKER: Stand-up Mathematician
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A year is about pi-ty million seconds. Not thirty million, not forty million, but pi-ty million. :)
mmh. you're right, but your choice of terminology is a bit... unintuitive.
pi-ty million sounds like 3.14 million, not 31.4 million
It's a bit like saying twoty-million instead of twenty-million...
KuraIthys a tenth of year is about Pi million seconds
I prefer "pi seconds is a nanocentury" :)
@@ryanxin1848 I hope not! A tenth of a year is about pi *million* seconds. :)
Nimen Naçnammè oh yeah typo sorry :p
Matt: "We'll stand a double-decker bus apart."
*stands 0.8 double-decker buses apart*
A Parker bus distance
Also known as a 1.6-decker bus.
They're standing apart by the length of the part you use, not the size of the packaging.
"And so I'm joined by Tim *exactly* one double-decker bus away".
Are you sure? I'd add another 5% of a bus to your measure.
they're clearly less than a bus apart.
Lee Smith yes
they measure the wheel base, dont worry
they are a parker bus apart
They are 2/3 busses apart, as measured by screen pixels gauged by my pinky.
A Parker Bus is a good term for it. A Parker 10th of a Billion is also 67 million. So basically 1 Parker unit is equivalent to 2 out of 3. That's not bad, that's having a good go at it.
Depends if you're rounding to the nearest bus or not.
I love the phrases "don't engage your emotional reaction" and " no one is trying to help you understand, they want you to hurry up and feel something"
Overheard at a planetarium show in Seattle:
If the Earth were the size of a grain of sand...
It would be really small.
I asked my friend "if the earth were the size of a tennis ball and the moon a ping-pong ball, how far apart they would be?" And he just pointed at the actual moon and said "that far away."
@@dreska255 Can`t really fault him for forgetting to add the change of the radius of both when you put your friend on the spot like that.
@@dreska255 You hold the tennis ball in one hand and the ping pong ball in the other and then you separate your arms as far apart as possible. That gives the correct answer provided you are 2 metres tall |:
Useful for messing around with general relativity: if the Earth were compressed into a black hole, its event horizon would be the size of a large marble. A one-solar-mass black hole would be about the size of my town.
Matt McIrvin -- Is there a rule-of-thumb formula for converting solar masses to event horizon radius?
Once the stack of dollar bills was brought up I got flashbacks to Tom Scott driving for hours.
same
+1
yea
Me too. Tom really nailed the point home though. That, and he also really wanted to go to the beach it seems...
These guys don't get the point of the stack of dollar bills to the moon idea. The point is not to compare to something we know so the amount is somehow comprehensible, it's to make people realise what a ridiculously huge quantity it is and how we have no freaking idea how massive it is.
"Is 4 a lot?"
"Depends on the context. Dollars? No. Murders. Yes."
That depends on the size of the area where the murders took place, and how much time it took for them to happen. If you’re talking about the number of murders on your street over the weekend, then yeah, that sounds like a lot, but if you’re talking about the number of murders in your country over the last century, 4 doesn’t sound like very much to me.
@@chriswebster24 it's not a lot for my basement.....
So if everyone lost five pounds, the NHS would save less than a pound per person. Imperial units and currency units are confusing.
I guess this is why we use lb., lol
Even just staying within the imperial units, there's the ounce avoirdupois and the fluid ounce, which are both frequently shortened to just "ounce". A sterling example of confusibility, not involving Sterling, one might say.
Plus pound weight and pound force and pound mass. EDIT I guess I’m willing to accept pound weight and pound force as the same thing, but people don’t use them the same.
Indeed. Giving up 5 pounds to save 1.3, sounds like a 3.7 deficit.
I was also very confused and had to watch that bit more than once to keep straight what they were talking about 😂
As a programmer I find it very useful to remember that a day has a bit less than 100k seconds (86400 seconds to be exact), so when someone says that "there are millions of events every day" you can just convert it to "there are tens of events every second", which is really not that much for computers.
milli-Helen - sufficient beauty to launch a single ship
@@Awhite3 there are several competitive definitions of the Helen and mili-helen. I prefer the mili-helen is one ship, and about three micro-helens is enough to get a single oarsman.
I thought it was you from your thumbnail Lester
This is supremely dank
I first encountered this definition in the program notes of a PDQ Bach concert. To make it more perfect, the person with me at the concert was a Helen.
Ahh, that must mean I have a milli-Helen of beauty. One time I walked past a boat and the captain took one look at my face and he started yelling at the sailors to steam away as fast as possible
American List of Preferred Measurements (4th edition):
Imperial
Driving Minutes (for distance)
Olympic Swimming Pools
Football Fields
Empire State Building
School Busses
Your own Feet/Steps
Coca Cola Bottles
Whales
Washing Machines
Metric
bananas
What's metric doing there? :P
I believe metric is way below washing machines
You forgot Olympic sized swimming pools.
@@davel6683 id say thats one of the really bad ones... i dont know about you, but i couldnt for the life of me tell you how big an olympic sized swimming pool is - all i know is that it sounds big...but i suspect it isnt actually that big
My least favourite number analogy - when a reporter tells you that something weighs 10 kilos and then feels that they have to put it in simple terms by adding "that's the same as 10 bags of sugar"...
I actually really like "1 liter carton of milk" as an analogy of weight. Milk is about as heavy as water, which is 1 kilo per liter. I don't know how much 3.8 kg is, but I can imagine "about four cartons of milk".
Also, a bathtub holds about 300 liters of water, which is about a third of a cubic meter. That means a cubic meter is about three bathtubs.
@@Yora21 Just the other day my kids were asking how much is 10kg? We get milk in 3L bottles, so my response was about 3 bottles of milk.
That last point was incredible. "No one wants you to understand. They want you to hurry up and feel something."
My favorite part of this book is how the dialogue between you two demonstrated that you need YOUR OWN landmark numbers, not someone else's. Every time he'd say his intuitive amount, you'd do it differently and have your own intuitive amount, but you could still talk because it made sense to you both.
The phrase “24/7/365” always hits my eardrums awkwardly. There are 24 hours in a day. Then there are 7 days in a week. So my brain is expecting the next corollary to be 52, as in the number of weeks to a year. But instead, this popular phrase jumps back to days again! I think “24/7/52” would make more sense in a short list of quantities meant to convey the listener’s attention from the duration of a day to that of a year. Right then. End rant. Cheers! -Phill, Las Vegas
Thank you for ruining that for me. Don't you know I have _enough_ to get ranty about already!
In that case you need to ask yourself what 52 x 7 is, that's why.
Hmm a month is 4 weeks so.... 13 months!
More precise would be 24/7/365dot25period
So you go from weeks to years & skip months?
When people use analogies like "this will stretch to the moon in back x times", the point is not to give anyone an intuitive sense of *how* big something is, just that it's really really big. It's pretty much equivalent to saying, "there are as many ___ as grains of sand on a beach" or "there are as many ___ as there are atoms in the universe". They are kind of like fake landmarks, things that you don't appreciate the actual size of, but you know they are big.
The same thing happens on small scales too. "Smaller than a human blood cell", "smaller than the HIV virus"
I actually learned the other day that modern transistors in computers are smaller than a human blood cell and the HIV virus. Lol. I don't know how small those things are, but I know they're very tiny, and the idea that we make transistors that small is insane. It at least gave me the sense that we really are reaching a limit of how small we can make transistors
There's a physical limit to reduction of matter-based transistor size: the elemental atoms necessary in such constructions have physical dimensions even tho tiny, plus EM interference between electronic data paths become increasingly problematical as distances between such paths decrease. Hence the push towards quantum electronics (for processing) & optical/light-based data storage/transmission (for less interference & increased high-speed bandwidth, now common in fancy hifi setups as well as media/gaming displays where big screen audiences appreciate the high definition & lack of transmission lag). The transistor, however, currently remains the key basic component for almost all such devices, no matter how it's utilised or described (eg as a controlled switch or as an amplifier, adjusting electronic or optical (or whatever else) signals): even a simple memory cell can be constructed from a few transistors & capacitors :)
[words added/changed for clarification due to @Aaron Wtr drawing me back to this msg - tks Aaron! :)]
Transistors atm go as small as 7 nanometer and viruses generally are a few tens of nanometers. I agree with you. Even if you can’t actually appreciate some extremely small or large numbers, landmarks in these ranges actually do help you contextualize similar numbers. In astronomy for example, it is quite common to express masses of stars/black holes relative to the sun, for example: “black hole x is 55 times the mass of the sun”.
But that's a waste of brain
I know I'm late to the party, but speaking of small computer things, the engraving in silicon microchips that allows them to function is less than six hydrogen atoms across on average, iirc. I believe the average is 5½ atoms.
The transistors are actually so small that if they got any smaller they would be ruined by quantum tunneling, they're about 50 atoms across
One thing I keep in mind are various odds to put chances into perspective:
Coin flip - 50%
Rolling a one on one die - 16%
Rolling a 20 on a 20-sided d&d die - 5%
Rolling a 12 on two dice ~ 3%
Flipping heads 10 times in a row - 0.1% (1 in 1,000)
Flipping heads 20 times in a row - 0.0001% (1 in 1,000,000)
When people say "It was only a 10% chance of rain and it's pouring, weather man screwed up", I use the rolling a 1 analogy.
When people say there is only a 3% chance of dying to Covid, I ask how often they rolled a 12 in monopoly.
Chances of winning the powerball lottery? (1in 300 million), roughly equal to flipping heads 28 times in a row.
Try 0.08%
That's the likelihood of a random person under 65.
Even lower if you don't have any comorbities.
Those are some good numbers to keep handy. That said, I'm not sure comparing Covid with Monopoly is a great analogy - in a single game a player is likely to roll tens of times, and throughout their life a person may play many games of Monopoly, whereas the 3% risk is something someone presumably only faces once. I guess closer analogy would be with rolling a 12 on your first go in a game of Monopoly, but I feel like that isn't a very intuitive thing to judge.
The 10% chance of rain thing is frustrating - given the countless weather forecasts we've all heard, we should absolutely expect some of them to be wrong, even when there was relatively high certainty. People are the same with stuff like the Xcom computer game - if they miss a shot with a 95% hit chance they decide the game must be broken, but for every 20 such shots you should expect to miss one, and you take hundred throughout the course of a campaign.
Our intuitive emotional sense of probability is pretty lumpy - anything above a certain threshold seems like a dead cert, and most of what isn't a dead cert is basically seen as being 50/50.
@@TheJamesM The monopoly bit, mainly it is when someone claims that "it's only 3%, so even if I get it I'll be fine!". So I explain that it is on par with rolling a 12 and ask "Are you willing to bet your LIFE on not rolling a 12 on your next toss?" Suddenly they realize that while it isn't exactly common, it can and has happened... and makes them less likely to just dismiss that small chance with major stakes.
@@TheJamesM Yep, which is why many games will "fudge" probabilities towards 50% to make players feel less bad about bad RNG
Getting COVID-19 at an American rally.....50/50. You will or you won’t
0:05 Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was "Oh no, not again"
I'm good. I've got my towel.
This is the second video recommendation in a row that has a Hitchhikers' Guide reference that isn't spoken about (Tom Scott - 555 numbers); what are the chances of that? Answers in bad landmark numbers only.
I completely missed that. Douglas Adams was the master of the improbable...
P.S. I just rediscovered my need for an infinite improbability drive
Perhaps it fell after being struck by a double-decker bus whose driver had inadequately analogized its length. Again.
@@OneFatStatue The chances of that are 42.
To paraquote Brian David Gilbert, a classic naval hit point is the number of 14" shells you can withstand. So all living creatures have 1 HP.
Correct me if I made a mistake here, but on data storage: A Lorum Ipsum .txt file of 140 000 words is about a megabyte. "Ready Player One" by Ernest Cline is 136048 words. So a tome like that is ~1 megabyte. I know what a large book looks like. A hundred megabytes is a well stocked bookcase of 100 such books. I know what a filled book case looks like. Ten such bookcases is a row of bookcases in a library, and thus a gigabyte. I know what a library row looks like. A floor in a library is maybe ten rows, so 10 GB on a library floor. I know what library floor looks like. A huge library with 12.8 floors filled with books (and 0.2 for the lobby and coffee corner) is equivalent to the 128 GB usb stick dangling from my keychain. I've never been to a library that size, though they probably exist.
(if you're in the UK) an easy way to see one is to visit either the British Library, Cambridge University Library or the Bodleian library in Oxford - I know CUL is 5 gigantic floors and 6 medium-sized ones.
I'd say 10 rows per floor is a bit of an under estimate, I'd double it. still amazing how many tiny bookcases you have on your keyring
Ready Player One is a terrible book, though...
@@error.418 Never actually read it. I just looked up a page count of well known books and it was close to what I needed for the example.
You are more visualizing the amount of data that is in a library than the other way around. You are essentially encoding the texts in the books in the library as .txt files and storing them on your USB Stick. That's a little lossy, because formatting and images etc., but it works.
But It's still the amount of data in a library made understandable, rather than the amount of data your USB Stick holds, because as you said: "I've never been to a library that size.", but you definitely know what a 128GB USB-Stick looks like, costs, weighs, etc.
Now how do you think for truly big amounts of data? The internet in some estimates is around 50 Zettabytes of data. Now, if you don't know your metrics (I sure don't) that's 10^(3*7) Bytes of data. Does it make sense to use libraries or USB-Sticks? I'd say neither.
But let's say that's *all* video. An hour of 4k Video is around 42 GB. So if we said the entire Internet is one big high definition video, it would take you around 10^12 hours to watch it. That's ~100 million years.
That's a 4k video documentary from the evolution of crocodiles to today, in REAL TIME. (Dinos were still around for the first 1/3 of the movie, the extinction event is the first big climax after about 33 million years.)
My go-to for understanding the height of something is 1 story ≃ 10 feet ≃ 3 meters. For example, the Falcon 9 rocket is 230 feet high, which doesn't tell me much. But that's the height of a 23 story building, which I understand right away, and it also happens to be about the height of the building I live in.
works for residential buildings but most office buildings will be closer to 4m per story... not a million miles off but makes a difference.
@@mralistair737 true, but not all that important when you're just trying to get a sense of scale.
does not compute, since the level height between office buildings and living flats differ by about 50 percent.
@@mralistair737 industrial buildings often have 5m due to more ventilation and thick floors.
I guess that works for Americans, but here in the UK, A storey (note the "e") can be between 8 and 16 feet, give or take
This video is approximately 0.6 Matt Subscriber Milliseconds long.
Wouldn't it be better to multiply in this instance? If all Matt's subscribers watch this video, they'd have used about 18 years combined.
Math checks out, for the time being at least. I don't think this unit is very future proof sadly
16*6+5=965
965*1.000*0.6=579.000
that's actually pretty close
585.000/1000/965=0.6062
@@Justin-oo3bh I certainly hope this unit is useless in the future because that means more subscribers for Matt and more knowledge for CZcams!
The way you are doing the math a longer video (with the amount of subscribers constant) would result in a number lower than 0.6 That seems like an odd way to do it.
This reminds me of one of my data visualization pet peeves: different sized circles to represent different quantities. For example, one circle represents 100 of something and a circle with twice the radius represents 400 of that thing, BUT people don’t intuitively get that twice the radius means four times the amount. Area increasing with the square of length is not an intuitive idea for many people, and this style of visualization helps nobody, except maybe the graphic designer
Graphics of 3D cubes/spheres are even worse - an order of magnitude looks insignificant as a change of radius of a sphere, about double....
When it comes to understanding excessive wealth I use “minimum wage years” as landmark number.
For example, Jeff Bezos’ net worth is about 13 million minimum wage years.
Homo Sapiens appeared 200 000 years ago, dinosaurs disappeared 65 million years ago - somewhere in between those two lies the order of magnitude of time a single human would have to work to acquire (and reasonably spend) such amount of wealth ...
Damn, this is a good one.
Edit: Though, whoever you are talking to needs to know what minimum wage you refer to.
@@xCorvus7x It hardly matters, the point remains the same. I live in a Western European country and make an average wage and would still need to work for millions of years to get anywhere near what he's worth.
@@kykk3365
Sure, the order of magnitude will probably stay the same; but you could be off by a third or two fifths, which would translate to dozens of millions of years.
Another Jeff Bezos one I liked - You could pay yourself $10,000/hr, every hour of every day since 1 A.D. and you still wouldn't have as much net worth as he does.
(Ignoring inflation and interest, obviously).
This website mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/ gave me an intuitive sense of wealth~
I've been listening to Tim Harford on More or Less for over 10 years and never seen his face. I assumed he was just a disembodied voice that had possessed a microphone at the BBC. Watching Tim walk and talk like he is a normal person was somehow deeply unsettling.
Same effect for me when I finally saw Josh and Chuck from How Stuff Works.
"isn't a double decker just very intuitive?"
Someone is very Londoncentric over there. I've never seen one of those in my life
They are about the size of a dinosaur. y/w
Well you have now
Not just London, but at least metropolitan European centric.
Think of a single-decker bus and double its height.
Well, now you can relate it to the size of a Matt Parker, who's about the size of a human.
If the Earth had a diameter of 1 foot, then the moon would be one double-decker bus away, and would be the size of a softball.
Nah, the Earth and Moon would be about 7 meters apart at that scale which is about Tim and Matt are apart even if they are claiming to be a bus length away
@@stoatystoat174 Earth diameter: 12742 km, Earth-Moon distance (avg): 384400 km, bus length: 9.144 m; 12742 / 384400 = x / 9.144, where x = diameter of earth (in bus scale); x = .3031 m = .9944 peasant units (aka feet). Thus earth to moon is 1 bus length if earth is 1 ft diameter.
@@yuriyromaniw6629 I stand corrected, thanks for polite concise maths reply. Think I was thinking of the basketball earth, tenis ball moon distance and thinking a basketball was a foot in diameter. They are not. (sorry for the use of the word 'Nah' without any working)
@@stoatystoat174 And thank you. That's why I Iike this channel - I post an equation and have a reasonable conversation.
I have *no* idea how big a 'softball' is. How many inches/centimetres is that?
This made me think of a pod cast I've been listening to, The British History Podcast. That includes a historic number metaphor.
Anglo-Saxons talked of land in Hides. One Hide is 120,000 m^2. To leave it there no one would really understand it. However a Hide was "enough land to support a family ". So when Kings dole out 20,000 hides of land you know, almost intuitively, that's a lot! Or a peasant who dies and leave 1 hide to split between his sons is poor.
Sand lol I initially thought it meant an animal skin and I was like “wtf animal is that big??”
The American "40 acres and a mule" (a traditional concept of the amount you'd want to support yourself, an ultimately empty promise made to former slaves) is about 160,000 m^2, so that tracks.
I love the extra animations in this video. Kudos to the editor and animator.
They were done by William Marler. They even hid their name in one of the shots! wmad.co.uk
@@standupmaths i knew exactly when to find it too! 0:10 on the billboard in NewYork
Right below the Parker Square 😏
I agree.
And poor Dino, keeps colliding with the sign.
When I was a teenager, my dad reminded me that you only get about 2000 weekly wages in your life to try to get me to budget.
In Melbourne, Australia, everything to do with volume is measured relative to the Melbourne Cricket Ground as being "enough to fill X MCGs". Especially when the papers want to contextualise large construction projects
One MCG is approximately 100,000 people.
reminds me of the "give every person a million bucks" tweet
They made reference to it in the video at 6:53
@@AKAMustang ooh i didnt actually notice that
I always say that if somebody reports an absolute number, it's because the percentage is insignificant, and vice versa.
True. Unfortunately there's no way to report a number that's significant in both absolute and relative terms.
@@austinpowers7670 That's a good thing. This is mostly used to hide the truth by reporting the one that sounds like more; report a 0.015% increase as $1M or a $1000 increase instead as 15% or - my favorite - an increase from 0.001% to 0.0012% as a 20% increase.
If both relative and absolute values are about equally important, it's harder to mask the importance.
The dreaded 'width-of-a-human-hair' analogy.
But it is at least a little intuitive.
You can always pluck one off to check.
That one is occasionally useful. For instance, if something floats above a surface so closely that it would collide with a hair, that's pretty close, and you have an idea of that. (And if it floats so closely that it'd collide with a *fingerprint*, that is insanely close.)
You'd get into trouble with this one, because people from different ethnic groups will have wildly differing thicknesses of hair. So whose hair are we talking about?
5:05 - I’m obsessed with the way he rattles off “double decker bus”
My favorites are found in astronomy:
- An astronomical unit (AU) is the average distance from the earth to the sun. It's a very handy comparison to give a sense of scale when things are between 1/4 and 100 AUs.
- A lightyear is how far light travels in a year. At first, this one seems unintuitive. But consider this: once you measure things that big, there is no sense of scale that your brain can really comprehend. With the lightyear, you at least know how far back in time you're seeing something (when something is 4.2 lightyears away, you're seeing it's state 4.2 years ago). And since so many things in astronomy are measured in lightyears, we get good comparative numbers. So the closest star is about 4 LY away, the other side of our galaxy is about 100,000 LY away, and the closest galaxy is about 2.5 million LY away. Since we measure them all in LY, it's easy to compare and get a sense of relative scales.
And then there's the one popularized by Star Wars: the parsec. It's not really intuitive given the math, but it's just above ¾ of the distance between the Sun and Alpha Centauri. The definition isn't based on that, but it's close enough.
I always calculate app prices in 1 Euro/Pound/Dollar cheeseburgers from your fast food joint of choice. Like if an app is 2.99, I think "Would this app bring me as much joy as three cheeseburgers?"
That reminds me that the "Big Mac index" to compare economies of different counties really is a thing
It doesn't take much to equal the joy of a $1 cheeseburger.
For expensives apps/games/hobbies, I like to take cinema as a comparaison. Cinema is roughly 5€ per hour and per person.
i measure larger investments in grams of weed (about €10/g)
i think a gram is about an 8th of an ounce. i am not googling to support english/american subbornness though.
@@kettenschlosd "i think a gram is about an 8th of an ounce"
Glad you're happy about your lack of knowledge.
Two things I'm surprised were not mentioned:
1. The Smoot.
2. Pi seconds is approximately a nanocentury.
PI seconds is an APPLE PIE 🥧 🤣🤪
One unit I do like is a milliweek. 1/1000th of a week is approximately 10 minutes(really 10 mins 4.8 seconds), but it leads to a really interesting realisation as to just how quickly small things add up since 10 minutes really really short, 1hour 40 minutes is 1% of your week, think about that, anything you spend an hour 40 on each week is 1% of your life; each working day(assuming 7 hours) is 4.2% of your week, a full working week(35 hours) is ~20% of your week, sleep is 33% of your week, that means half your week is spent doing stuff you don't want to do but need to do. Make every 10 minutes count!
scragar I like it!
Link for slowpokes; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot
Or with an Englishman, and an Aussie: a cricket pitch to visualise distance - 22 yds btw
"Double-decker buses are such a brilliant and intuitive unit of distance!"
Literally anyone who isn't British: (Visible confusion)
Same here.
Not just British. Matt is Australian. There are busses all around the ex-colonies.
Football field 🏈🇺🇸🇺🇸
@@derekjc777 Sydney only got double decker buses on a few routes a couple of years ago. There's always been a few here and there imported for promotions and stuff though. The first one I ever rode was either in Berlin or Istanbul.
Here in Melbourne we measure distance in W-class trams.
"By all means get excited or get angry, but first understand what's happening. [...]
The reason that so many of the comparisons we see are unhelpful is because no one is trying to help you understand, they want you to hurry up and feel something."
Incredible
Maybe this is not a so-good comparison, since most people don't have either an intuitive notion of how fast light is or how fast a computer is, but I really like this fact that I came up with: light travels around 10 cm during one CPU clock cycle (roughly one operation, let's say). When you know that electricity is a little slower than light, it makes you think about the length of all those connections between computer components, and how slow everything is compared to a CPU.
Admiral Grace Hopper used to hand out wires that were a nanosecond long.
@@RickBoat I didn't know that. Searching a little, I found this incredible footage : czcams.com/video/9eyFDBPk4Yw/video.html . Thank you sir, you have made my day!
My most used landmark number is a "work year" is around 2000 hours. (40 hrs/wk x 50 weeks).
An article I read years and years ago tried to scare people about an education gap between countries, and said that U.S. students were "only" given 1500 hours of homework a year (on top of time already spent in school), while it was ~2500 hours a year for European students, and ~3500 hours a year for Japanese students. Since every one of these numbers is ridiculous right out of the gate, I knew I could ignore the rest of the article.
And of course the most important reason this landmark is valuable: looking at your various Steam "time played" metrics and having an existential crisis about what you're doing with your life...
Lol good example.
When they talk about the overweight citizens of the UK losing weight to save 100 million pounds, the population they used was for everyone in the UK. Shouldn't it just be the overweight populus to determine how much losing 5 pounds would save the government on a per person basis?
Just looked it up: in the UK over 60% of adults are either overweight or obese. So it would only result in a factor of roughly 2, so still only a little saving per overweight person.
No, because the NHS is funded by taxation and you aren’t taxed more for being overweight
the one that drives me the most crazy is (in the states, at least) when news broadcasts try to express how high up something is by comparing it to a building of certain number of stories. For instance, if something fell 150 feet they always say 'thats like falling from the top of a 15 story building.,' as if typical floors were 10' high. I can tell you as an architect that number is off by 30-60%. Most buildings built in the last few decades are anywhere from 14' -16' per floor, or sometimes more. So falling 150 feet is actually more like falling from a 10 story building. I get why they do it, just like stated in the video, its more about an emotional response than a useful reference....but still.
My first thought would be 'office or residential building?'
1 ton = 1 m³ of water ≈ 13 people
1 litre of water = 1 decimetre^3 :D
@@bl4cksp1d3r or a 1000cm³, seems easier to reference
one tonne not ton metric tonnes are smaller.
@@rewrose2838 or saying a 1 meter cube of water weighs 1 tonne and is 1000 litres
@@mralistair737 US or UK ton?
One metric that I like to use is hourly wage. If I want to make a non-essential purchase, I think about how long I would need to work to afford that thing. So if I wanted to buy a new tv for $500, and if I made $20/hour(not taking taxes and such into account), that would cost me 25 hours.
And a quick way to work out an annual wage from hourly is double it and multiply by 100. Works well if you average around 40 hours a week
This is what makes me wind up buying almost nothing ever. Too depressing to think about.
I use this for almost all purchases.
It's particularly handy for transport. 15 dollar cab fare to go somewhere that takes half an hour to walk? Well it's half an hour's wages.... Factor in the time to flag down a cab and it's not worth it.
Is it quicker to ride my bike or drive my car? Driving 10 km in city traffic takes about 20 minutes and burns 3 minutes worth of fuel. The bicycle takes 22 minutes. The bicycle is quicker.
I used to work on that principle (I got paid for my lunch hour so set my budget for lunch to an hours wage (retail)) but now I work on percentage of my 'disposable /free' income because I found I would fail to factor in the number of hours I needed to work just to pay the bills and eat.
If you are pondering about doing a repairjob on your car/house and wonder if it is worth to do it yourself, estimate how long it would take you to do it and how much you would earn doing that ammount overtime at your job, then ask yourself if it is as bad as doing overtime or not. (plumber wants £200, I would earn £150, but I hate doing plumbing, and I want warranty on the work)
I would rather work an hour on my car then doing an hour of overtime, but I would rather do an hour of overtime then an hour of unclogging the sewer system....
The last part about "first understand things and then eventually get angry about it" is probably the best life I have ever heard.. Absolutely wonderful
In PE the teacher asked us to write on a scale of 1-10 how good we thought we were at badminton, so he could make fairer teams. I proudly wrote π next to my name.
Your PE teacher had obviously never heard of Dunning-Kruger :)
If you'd just been to the doctor you could say something like "I'm as good at badminton as my knee hurts!"
so roughly just a 3
Ah yes. Worse at badminton than you thought you were at math.
Matt Parker: "All numbers are my friends."
Me: "Except tau, right?"
I understood that reference.
Friendship ended with tau.
Now 2*pi my best friend.
@@PeterBarnes2 Tau by any other name would smell as sweet.
And pi smells sweeter.
@@PeterBarnes2 You are smelling to much BS and calling it sweet. Pi is a pun.
I was in college in the 1980s and we rated how good-looking girls were in milliHelens. As in, "If Helen of Troy's face could launch 1000 ships, how many ships could Brenda's face launch?" Electrical engineering nerds; no wonder we didn't have girlfriends.
But your have unlimited charges ! Don’t be so negative 🤣🤣🤣🤣
One would hope that that rating system is no longer current.
What are the units of attraction currently? I imagine Kelvins, for hotness. Calibration is difficult. It could be Newtons, force of attraction. It could be Pascals, for pressure. I suspect the Urban Dictionary has a better answer than this old EE.
Wow - we had exactly the same thing in the mid-90s. I assumed, foolishly, that we were the only ones to come up with it!
@@cholten99 Be careful in public, you might get a rejoinder in microPricks :-)
In Ireland distances (between towns especially) are given in time, while it is up to the person receiving the information to know whether the person giving it drives or takes the bus.
Here in the house we measure temperature in cats. "It was cold last night, there were 7 cats on my bed."
2:11 I love that detail of that text on the bus and behind the fence
Length:
Radius of Earth ~ 6000 km
Circumference of Earth = 40000 km (this is more-or-less exact, because it was the original definition of a meter)
Weight:
Human ~ 70 kg
Time:
52 weeks in a year
250 working days in a year
2000 working hours in a year
Density:
Water = 1 kg/l (all living things have approximately this density)
Metal ~ 10 × water (except aluminium = 3 and gold and lead = 20)
Speed:
Sprinter ~ 10 m/s
Sound ~ 300 m/s
Light = 3×10^8 m/s
Mach 1 = 1200kmh
Airplane 900kmh
Mine really just shows how insane some of the numbers in physics are, in particular the relative strength between the four fundamental forces.
The Strong Force is the strongest at 10^38 times stronger than gravity. Electromagnetism is next at 10^36 times stronger than gravity and 1/137 the strength of the strong force (as far as I remember). The weak force is 10^25 times stronger than gravity or 1/10,000,000,000,000 (10 trillion) the strength of the strong force.
But 10^38 is beyond our normal understanding of number, which is where the "landmark" number comes into play (it still doesn't make any reasonable sense): If gravity is the energy given off by a 1W light bulb in one second (1 joules), then the strong force is the energy given off by the sun (3.8 × 10^26 watts) for 10,000 years (~1.2 x 10^38 joules).
Yeah it makes no sense. But it wouldn’t make sense to use either energy given off by the sun or 10,000 years in any “landmark”. What you’re doing is the same effect of stacking dollar bills to the sun: saying something that exclusively communicates “that’s a big number”. This does not at all do justice to the magnitude of the number. Imagine I ask you which is bigger: the number of hydrogen atoms in the sun or the number of protons it would take to span the distance to andromeda. The vast majority of people have zero clue, yet the difference is 10^20-fold (if I did my quick google search right). Likewise, a good chunk of people couldn’t compare the number of dollar bills to the sun with energy emitted over 10,000 years in joules. They’ll probably guess the energy, but by how much is a crapshoot. A billion times? A trillion times? Surely not 10^30. Someone asks how much money is Jeff Bezos worth, it’s way more useful to think $600 per American rather than the number of solar neutrinos that pass through your thumbnail over 2 seconds. I know, with numbers on that scale you can’t have a good analogy. Even something like comparing the energy of a microwave oven photon with the energy released by little boy are beyond the scope of human comprehension. It’s a lot better to point out the scale of certain concepts that landmarks aren’t helpful in, rather than trying and failing. You take the exact thing “landmark” comparisons exist to combat and give it the same name. It’s not a bad landmark, it just isn’t a landmark. Nothing on that scale can utilize a landmark.
Edit: Just to be clear, these numbers aren’t at all accurate. Maybe within a couple orders of magnitude. I need sleep and so I cobbled together examples what work decently enough to get my point across.
@@limepop340 As I said, the "point" in mine is to show that the numbers are just incomprehensible. The size difference is so vast that you cannot actually make sense of it. I mean, there's only 10^26 hydrogen atoms in 1 gram of hydrogen, so it'd be like comparing a single hydrogen atom to 10 million tons of hydrogen.
I wanted to make it easier to onderstand, but the difference in energy between a bang snap and the tsar bomba is "only" roughly 2x10^14
no idea to go further than that
One thing I don't quite understand: how are you comparing these forces? They're each proportional to some property (mass/charge/whatever), right? So instead of saying that gravity is weak, couldn't I just as accurately say that there's not much mass?
@@DavidGuild "I'm" comparing them by using the numbers found by scientists who understand this stuff WAY better than I do.
All I am really getting from it is that it's obvious why static electricity and magnets can easily overcome the force of gravity.
I've heard that six inches is a hotly contested measurement for a lot of guys.
depends on landmark-ness
"it might _look_ like 6 inches but it smells like a foot!"
Nah i prefer subway
So's six feet
I have a bunch of these! (Note: I'm rounding A LOT here; many of them are off by factors of two or three or four; it's mostly an order-of-magnitude thing, except when I happen remember a more specific value.) I didn't remember all of them and had to check a bunch to make this list. Anyway, here:
*Miscellaneous:*
Number of stars in the galaxy ~ 100 billion
Number of galaxies in the universe ~ 1 trillion
Number of atoms in a cell ~ 100 trillion
Number of cells in a human ~ 100 trillion
*Money* (note that GDP/person is average income):
Bezos (richest person) net wealth (including illiquid assets) ~ 200 billion
US deficit (what gets added to the debt every year) ~ $1 trillion more/year
US government spending (federal, state, & local) ~ $10 trillion/year
Total US debt ~ $20 trillion
US GDP ~ $20 trillion/year ($60,000/person/year)
US GDP growth ~ 2.5%/year, so around $500 billion more/year
GWP (Gross World Product) ~ 100 trillion/year (~$10,000/person/year)
Average income of the bottom billion or so ~ $1/day, or ~$500/year
Average income of someone born into the bottom billion after they move to the US, if they're allowed ~ $10,000/year
*People:*
NYC population ~ 10 million
UK population ~ 50 million
Nigeria population ~ 200 million
America population ~ 330 million (~1/3 of a billion)
Europe population ~ 750 million
India population ~ 1 billion
China population ~ 1 billion
Africa population ~ 1 billion
People living under $2/day ~ 1 billion
Asia population ~ 4 billion
World population ~ 8 billion
*INTERLUDE* | Here's a use-case combining *money* and *people:* If you took all of Bezos's money, you can pick 1 of the following to do:
* Abolishing all taxes & fully fund the US governments (with 0 deficit) for 1 week
* Keep all taxes & fully fund the US governments (with 0 deficit) for 2 months
* Pay 1% of existing US debt
* Give every American (including hundreds of thousands of ex-Amazon employees) a one-time $500 check
* Give the poorest billion a one-time $200 check (about doubling their yearly salary for one year (except those that used to work somewhere in Amazon's supply chain))
* Give everyone a one-time $25 check
(Note that, of course, you couldn't actually do this; like all billionaires, most Bezos's wealth is purely theoretical because it's shares of stock (in this case Amazon). So you'd need to liquidate a lot of Amazon's shares, but doing so would crash the value of Amazon shares. That's why Bezos can't actually buy $200 billion worth of _stuff_ even if he wanted to. But for the sake of the argument, this is what the scales of the numbers are.)
Moving on...
*Length:*
Earth's radius ~ 10,000 kilometers (10 thousand km)
Moon's orbit radius ~ 100,000 km (100 thousand km)
Sun radius ~ 1,000,000 km (1 million km)
Earth's orbit radius = *1 Astronomical Unit (AU)* ~ 100,000,000 km (100 million km)
Pluto's orbit _diameter_ ~ 100 AU ~ 10,000,000,000 km (10 billion km)
Oort cloud diameter ~ *1 light-year* ~ 100,000 AU
Distance to closest solar system (Alpha Centauri) ~ 4 light-years
Diameter of Milky Way ~ 100,000 light-years
Distance to closest galaxy (Andromeda) ~ 1,000,000 light-years
Diameter of the observable universe ~ 100,000,000,000 light-years
I'm an astronomy teacher from Israel, and when I teach about the asteroid that ended the dinosaur age I tell them this: The size of the asteroid is about the size of Gush Dan (Tel Aviv Metropolitan Area, 10km). The distance between Tel Aviv and Haifa, and Tel Aviv and Be'er Sheva is about 100km each, which is the radius of the Chicxulub crater. So imagine a rock the size of Gush Dan hitting Earth so hard it makes a hole all the way between Haifa and Be'er Sheva.
שלום.
Note that the asteroid theory is notably disputed (not that there was one, but that it caused the extinctions) - it's pretty crazy how scientists act when you start digging in, and makes you think about how a lot of science is reported as certain fact when there's been ongoing debate for decades.
Don't take this as an endorsement of any particular theory, I sure don't know anything!
@@SimonBuchanNz indeed, although I'm more upset by the people who see that and go "so maybe the dinosaurs didn't even die!" even though the only thing they witnessed was the exact cause of death being debated. And I think that's the value of phrases like "the rock that wiped out the dinosaurs", in that the wiping out of dinosaurs isn't in question. Then people can go "do you know it was maybe a volcanic eruption that really did them in?" and it still doesn't challenge the key point there.
(Cross apply to any other theories currently being debated heavily 😉)
@@kaitlyn__L yes, well there's scientific debate and "scientific debate", perhaps the media can't be blamed for simplifying in that context 🤷♂️
"I want to do it safely"
*get rolled over by a bus*
Even with 40+ likes, this is still an underrated comment
Not exactly a landmark NUMBER so to speak but this talk of breaking things down into things you understand to grasp things you don't understand is my favorite way of explaining things. And one I was using even ended up on the back of a product (Wifi Modem) and it made me smile when I saw it. Explaining how channels work in your modem by comparing channels to lanes on a road and data packets to cars, the more lanes you have, the more cars you can fit comfortably without slowdown. Again, not exactly what you're talking about, but definitely in the same vein of teaching, and I love all of it.
One category that I think sometimes gets overlooked but can be very useful are some basic senses of sizes for computer data. It helps really get a handle on, for example "how much better is a 100 Mb/s internet connection than a 1 Gb/s connection?"
So here are a few to get a sense of size:
1 byte: A text file with one character in it
1 kilobyte: A text file with about a paragraph of text
1 megabyte:
A text file with about 400 pages of text
OR a picture from a 5MP camera (iPhone from 2010)
2.5 megabytes: A picture from a 12MP camera (iPhone from 2020)
5 megabytes: About 4 minutes of MP3 audio
1-2 gigabytes: A movie at standard definition
3-5 gigabytes: A movie at high definition
1 terabyte: An HD movie collection with about 300 films
To help if you're finding it difficult to picture somewhere the size of Wales (standard UK unit for rainforest etc) according to latest research, it is the size of 2,861,974 football pitches (probably not taking account of topography)
Or, given that the top level measurement is Wales, the subunit should really be rugby pitches.
@@michaelocyoung I agree! Cymru am byth!
my favourite approximation I used in my physics degree all the time was that the number of seconds in a year is about pi * 10^7
I had to check that. Only 0.5% off, which is pretty amazing.
Something I remember is the circumference of the earth is 40,000 Kilometers or ~25,000 miles.
Puts into perspective the amount of miles I have on my car
The length of a double-decker bus is roughly one femtolightyear.
As a Welshman my favourite is multiples of the size of Wales when describing geographical areas.
And as someone who has never been to any UK region, I instinctively think “that’s another name for England, right? So everything in the UK south of Scotland.”
@@Keithustus No.
Tim: Don't get emotional about it. First, try to *understand* it.
Matt: *HIS BOOK IS OUT ISN'T THAT EXCITING OH YEAH!*
First the fact: The book out.
Then the emotion: Get excited!
The order checks out.
Jeff Scott based
Everybody should see this... Such useful information. Thank you! Awesome video!
Loved this video, great conversation.
Didn't even mention the classic football field analogy
That one (and you beat me to it) is the most ubiquitous.
They're nerds. How much time do you think they've spent looking at a football field?
@@edwardbarton1680 Matt's too distracted checking to see if any depictions of footballs are geometrically accurate to focus on the field
It's a very American analogy - I don't think I've ever heard it in the UK :P
@Mark Smith football in the UK isn't the same as football in the US. One is soccer and the other is a weird rugby-like thing.
The landmark number I like the best is that a nanosecond is about a foot as light travels. Or for those uncomfortable with feet, it’s 30cm or a third of a metre. So if I’m sitting six feet from my wife, we’re 6ns apart. 3m from my son, we’re about 9 or 10ns apart. So a microsecond is about 1000 feet, or 300m. I can get an intuitive idea of tiny timescales by relating them to human scale distances at the speed of light.
I was looking for someone using light speed. That's the ultimate unit of measurement.
It's also useful for understanding CPU clock speed. Electricity travels at about half the speed of light. Modern CPUs cap out around 5GHz, so you have 1/5 of a nanosecond per cycle. So electricity can only travel about an inch per cycle.
Audio engineers work on 1ft approx (0.89ft) per millisecond for setting up a delay fill in a hurry.
Performers like sub millisecond latency but have been happy to stand 20ft away from each other on stage.
You begin to wonder how an ochestra worked before close mic'ing.
@@QqJcrsStbt My work with electrical signals has been all in the RF ranges. 3.4m/s seems much lower than I've seen when flipping light switches, though. That means that there should be a very noticeable delay when turning it on, but there isn't.
0:56 I think we can all agree that that is actually a *parker* double decker bus away
Oh, how did the likes on this comment not blow up? Come on, people!
A useful one I know off the top of my head is that the earth is about 24,000 miles in circumference and is therefore spinning at about 1,000 mph. It's handy for being able to kind of guess distances on a map/globe.
Sign in Greggs: "Please keep 2 metres apart - that's about 15 sausage rolls"
63 timbits, here at Tim Horton's in Canada. I think that's a good video.
4 dancing penguins
The length of a coffin.
These "Landmark numbers" are, by their very nature, experience based. I'm from the US, and I have never been to Europe. I've never seen a double decker bus. I'm sure we have them in the US somewhere, but I've never experienced one. Therefore, this reference doesn't mean much to me. Thought I'd throw that in for consideration because I don't "intuitively know how big a double decker bus is". Do you intuitively know how big a full grown Blue Spruce tree is? Most people here in Colorado do.
As a person in Colorado, I do not know how big a fully grown blue spruce tree is (I've seen a lot of trees). I suppose a better analogy is a full-sized school bus (not a short one). They are pretty standard and you see enough of them during the school year that you get an idea.
The description to the vid suggests using your own to help contextualise numbers, like population of your area, height of local buildings etc.
US school buses are pretty standardised, so think of those instead. From what I can tell from a quick Google, school buses (up to 13 metres) are a little longer than double decker buses (9.5 metres).
I'm from Australia and have seen at least one double decker bus in the US. I think we now have enough data do analogize the chances of a random person seeing a double decker bus anywhere in the world.
And then there is the people that have never seen a double decker bus nor an American school bus...
I have no idea how long a bus is anyways, because I only seen them driving away, when I just missed it.
The one I hate most is "it's hotter than the surface of the sun".
It's not a particularly impressive temperature, and the saying should rather be "it's cooler than the surface of the sun" because it's the coldest part of the sun.
It's still hot enough to boil most things, and melt anything else.
But you can get hotter than the surface of the sun with off the shelf hardware (welders and the like). It's hot, but it's not "that's crazy!" impressively hot.
colder than a witches broom?
Well most things are cooler than the surface of the sun. My pillow is cooler than the surface of the sun. Obviously people are trying to tell you how hot something is that is very hot. If it surpasses the coolest part of the sun in temperature, well, it's still hotter than part of the sun, which is quite hot, though it may not be as hot as the upper convective zone of the sun, let alone the radiative zone or core. If it were, then we might say, "It's hotter than the core of the sun!" People intuitively understand what a surface is, as well as a core, while I had to look up the other layers of the sun. Though, it doesn't really have a surface.
You want an impressive temperature to use for comparisons? Start saying "It's hot enough to boil tungsten" because the surface of the sun is 500 degrees too cool to do that, and boiling tungsten still sounds like a pretty impressive thing to do.
That was great. I saw his numberphile on the storks, interesting. Also, loved the RouteMaster
Something that comforts me to know is that, if you use the right units, any measurement can be OVER 9000!!!!!
This comment deserves more likes 😂
Not only that, but if you use the right normalized unit, any measurement can be exactly ONE.
Max Planck has something to say about this
0 begs to differ.
@@benjaminmiller3620 Take int account rounding errors or measurment errors and then it becomes possible.
Out in the flat, open expanses of the US, we tend to measure distances in minutes/hours. Presumably using 60 mph average to keep the conversions simple.
Astronomers use a similar system ;)
They just use a little bit more than 60mph for conversions
I thought you mean minutes per hour and was very confused for a second
The one thing to love the mile for is that one mile per minute 😀 In the traffic jammed Netherlands, we hope to get one kilometer per minute on average.
It must be nice having reliable road networks where you can regularly go the speed limit... In the UK we tend to have 10mile drive to the big A road takes 30 mins, 30 mins on the A road takes you 80+ miles and then 20 mins on the single back roads to take you 5 miles to your destination. Then the next day a 40mile journey will take you the same amount of time since there are no big A roads near there.
I was going to comment about how some number analogies are not trying to build understanding but rather to make you astounded or dumbfounded, and then I was like "Well, maybe wait to the end of the video to see if they touch on it first". Glad I did, and the last bit was particularly insightful in conjunction with the technique of using landmark numbers, because then I totally understood why one would take issue with analogies meant to inspire awe more than understanding. Your guest (I already forgot their name but youtube isn't gonna let me go check it without losing my comment on my phone haha) is really good at connecting how numbers are used with ethical and social issues, glad they are making the rounds on the maths channels I watch. Good social distancing btw, stay safe Matt
Subtle "Hitchhiker's Guide" reference in the first 10 seconds, very nice!
One of my pet peeves for bad number analogies is where there is no analogy at all, but just no context ... like when news outlets report things like "Parkershire Council spent £50,000 on stationery last year!" in angry, outraged tones without giving any clue as to how it compares to similar organisations but is clearly aimed at making people think it's a big number.
Use the More or Less catchphrase "Is that a big number?"
stevieinselby To be fair, the Parkershire Council’s budget has come under scrutiny after wasting the tax payers’ money on the ill fated “Parker Square”.
Light can travel around the equator about 7.5 times in one second. I know the equator is still enormous, but it has always felt like a very intuitive way of picturing something otherwise quite astronomical.
I recently had to do a estimation like that to decide if it was worth upgrading a subscription channel for an extra $6 a month. The upgrade would remove ads, so I did the following calculation: I watch this channel about 2 hours a day. Given the amount of ads it shows, this is 15 minutes of ads per day, so roughly 2 hours per week, 100 hours per year! For $6 a month I free up four whole days of uninterrupted commercial watching per year! Definitely worth it!
In a similar vein, I've always used go-kart rides as a unit of measure to weigh spending money on a thing. An approximate going rate for a ride here in Seattle right now is $20/10 minutes. So if I'm considering spending $100 on something, I ask myself whether I'll get more enjoyment out of it than spending 50 minutes on a go-kart. I consider a go-kart ride to be the peak of/cap on "how much I'm willing to spend per unit of entertainment". What's great about using this unit of measure is it automatically adjusts as you travel, as the cost of 1 ride is generally pinned to 'as much as you can possibly get people to spend'.
For me, one of the most useful landmark numbers is the block. You can intuitively know how far any distance is if you say "it's 20 blocks away".
I would guess the average lenght of a block varies from country to country, but where I live (Perú), it's extra helpful because the average lenght is 100 meters, so converting from "blocks" to kilometers is just an order of magnitude.
Doesn't work in UK. There's no regular shape, let alone size for a block. You would never say 'It's 20 blocks away' here - no one would understand what it meant.
In the city in Melbourne, the major blocks are 800mx400m. They can also be split into minor blocks of 800mx200m. In the suburbs it varies wildly. It can sort of be used locally though. If I say such-and-so lives 3 blocks away, then great it's walkable. If it's too far to walk, I wouldn't have a clue how many blocks it was.
As a maths teacher I used an astronomical analogy about large numbers, the chess board and rice. I changed to stamps and asked how high will the stack of 2^63 stamps on the last square will be. It is 0,1 light year if a stamp is 0,1 mm thick. The reasom was not to make 2^63 make sense, but to show how rediculous large it is.
In Sweden we have a lottery. The chance to win big is 1/1000000. But how can we make 1/1000000 make sense? Well, a football field filled up with lottery tickets, is one million tickets. Pick the one!
@Simon Read I better start buying right away.
@Simon Read The same chance Kim Jung-il would get 38 under par and 11 hole in one, the very first time he tried golf. And he did it! And invented the hamburger. Probably at the same time.
The ending of this video reminds me of that scene in The Rutles mockumentary where Eric Idle has to first fast-walk, then jog, then run, then sprint to keep-pace with the cameraman before running out of breath in the middle of the street!
I really love Tim's podcast, so this was a pleasant surprise
I love the “bowl of petunias” hitchhiker’s reference
What, in this video? I didn't hear a Hitch-Hiker's reference in this video. Do I need to watch it again?
Edit: Never mind. I've just spotted it!
I can’t tell if 200 was a serious guess or not. He seems genuinely confident then surprised
I'm guessing Matt misunderstood the question. He was guessing the number of bills that were the width of a hand, not the number of bills from the ground to his hand.
@@couplabeersnobeers disagreed. 200 is way too high a guess for that.
Secondly a stack of one dollar bills is not am ambigous term, they were clealry talking about that and they both clealry understood what the analogy is about.
I loved the sneaked in Hitchhiker's Guide reference right at the start.
You always look like you have happiness in your eyes during the intro. I truly appreciate that.
in singapore, every primary and secondary school (age 7-12 and 13-16) has about 1000 students, so i use a school to measure population in thousands
my secondary school was that big, but my primary school only had about 150 students! that's a big primary school in singapore :o i guess being a city state minimising land use is really important?
@@kaitlyn__L yes, yes it is. in sg, buildings denser and more vertical
I think that analogies like "if you stacked 1$ bills, it would reach the moon" are not meant to give a reader a sense of how much money that is. Instead, I think the purpose generally is to give them the impression that it is an immeasurable amount of money. In other words, it is more manipulative due to its shock value than it is intended to be enlightening.
It seems that for an analogy to be informative, it must be tied to a common human experience. It is why distance is best measured in terms of how long it takes to travel that distance (an hour drive, a 15 minute walk, or an 8 hour flight).
I don't think it is useful for there to be a widely accepted list of analogies since they usually end up being very local or personal. I am sure many New Yorkers can appreciate and relate to the height of the Empire State Building but it means very little to me.
Its probably that the journalist in question is perhaps blindly following similar statements without thinking, a kind of cargo-cult response - can do the sums to figure out the height of the stack of bills, but doesn't try to understand what a number means in context,
I use a landmark to convert celsius and fahrenheit, 10c = 50f. Then use the 5/9 ratio to work out the temps from there. 15=59, 20=68, etc
I compare "entertainment" purchases (touristy things like mini-golf, ziplines, boat rides, go-karts, etc) to the price of a Movie Ticket (in regards to x amount of dollars for two hours)
I now use the book Humble Pi as a landmark book to evaluate the sarcasm in other books.
Nice Hitchhikers Guide reference! Love it!!!
ohh so that's why all my (translated) dinosaur books were talking about dubble decker busses even thought those are very rare where I live
Yeah, the presentation is very anglo-centric and somewhat out of date.
Dinosaurs or double-decker busses?
I was ready for the ranking to be
1. Metric
2. Double decker buses
3. Imperial
Sad days
I think the idea of using the stack of dollars to get to the moon/sun is not to give an intuitive response but more to illustrate the ludicrous scale of things in the trillions. Like showing that having that many of something that people know is very small, like a paper bill, reaches distances we have no good way of conceptualizing as people, can demonstrate how big a trillion really is
"Landmark numbers" is a lovely term for this idea! It's a very accessible way to practice number sense. (And it's a great basis for doing fun stuff like fermi estimates.)
For our newbie engineers we throw them one of the estimation quizzes and a couple of up to date Fermi estimates to do. The best estimation quiz score for 10% margin of error bounds was 7/10, that was only because they knew the answer to a couple. What does it teach, we all overestimate our abilites and knowledge. When someone throws me an estimate of time I mentally multiply by root 2. Turns out to be a good rule of thumb before you get to Hofstader's law of course.