Explainist » numbers

It Takes a Village of 100

Tom — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 00:20:51 +0000

Over the past few years, I’ve run into several articles and email forwards presenting a hypothetical village of 100 as a stand-in for the entire world population. For example, “if the world population were a village of 100 people, 61 people would be Asian, 15 would be malnourished, 20 would be overweight, etc.” Apparently this idea dates back to a 1990 piece by Dartmouth professor Donella Meadows. Snopes cautions that some versions in circulation are inaccurate.

Miniature-Earth.com features this short movie version:

This is a neat trick, as it accomplishes a few impressive explainist feats instantly:

It makes very big numbers comprehensible.
It lifts you out of your local/religious/ethnic perspective to consider the composition of human race as a whole.
It makes you imagine other people in the abstract as actual people that you live with (which they are).

We’re just not wired to imagine 6.7 billion people, but 100 is well within our grasp.

Illustrator/designer/photographer Toby Ng ran with the idea and created a series of village-of-100 posters.

The posters are sharp, but the metaphors within a metaphor are a little mind-bending (“if the human population were a village of 100 people, which comprised slices of a pizza…”). Is it too obvious of me to picture posters showing the hypothetical villagers themselves?

[via FlowingData]

The Difference Between $165 million and $170 billion

Tom — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 16:43:15 +0000

xkcd is here to clear things up:

Your Math Teacher Was Right About Units

Dave — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 17:55:11 +0000

Remember how silly it seemed when your fourth grade math teacher
insisted you always include units next to numbers that describe real world things? …Like 10 inches instead of just 10, or 30 days instead of 30. Showing early signs of the smartass I was to develop in to, I always thought, “This is totally unnecessary. Of course I’m going to remember what it is, I’m the one who wrote it.”

That’s all fine when you’re doing a homework assignment, but when you’re trying to communicate information to someone who may not be in the same room as you, data is flat and useless without units(and context). It’s bad explanation practice.

Case in point: Look at this graph that’s included in my water bill each month:

What the heck is a CCF? What do the water usage habits of others look like? What can this graph tell me? I suppose just knowing how I’m using water month-to-month is better than nothing, but if you’re going to go to the trouble to include this chart the least you could do is tell me what a “CCF” is. I can’t imagine most average citizens can make any meaning out of that abbreviation. Also, based on things like temperature and seasonality, I’m sure my water needs differ from month to month. How about helping me account for that? And what would be super-awesome is if you’d give me some frame of reference for my data. Am I a total water slob or a miser? What are some ways I could work on this? How will I know next month if I’m doing better?