…around the world

Hey, found my way over here from Twittertale. It’s funny you should mention this; I just heard a comparison like this this morning. It might have become popular because people figured it would be a better way to visualize the hugeness of the statistic — after a while numbers get so large that they don’t mean anything anymore, but wrapping around the world? That’s something I can at least visualize.

Unfortunately, though, I don’t think I’m alone in saying I can only do it in the abstract sense, so it’s not a particularly strong alternative to simply reciting numbers. I suppose these days the world doesn’t seem as incomprehensibly immense as it used to, but it’s still impossible to truly understand candy wrappers circling the globe. I don’t know if there’s really any way to effectively describe super-large amounts; our minds seem programmed to avoid trying to parse that much information at once.

Thanks for chiming in Matt. Looking back at when I wrote this post I was watching a lot of the food network. It seems this type of measurement happens a lot with food products. I am guessing this unit of measurement started some time after we learned that the world was not in fact flat.