Comments on: …around the world http://www.doug-march.com/around-the-world/ design, development and music intelligence Sun, 06 Jul 2008 04:53:31 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5.1 By: Doug March http://www.doug-march.com/around-the-world/#comment-2330 Doug March Wed, 02 Jan 2008 21:23:53 +0000 http://www.doug-march.com/around-the-world/#comment-2330 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. 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.

]]> By: Matt McVickar http://www.doug-march.com/around-the-world/#comment-2329 Matt McVickar Wed, 02 Jan 2008 21:17:26 +0000 http://www.doug-march.com/around-the-world/#comment-2329 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. 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.

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