Maybe inkbunny is not the right place for such a post, but I felt like this had to be said somewhere!
It is often the case that we see very large numbers are used to incite shock and awe in many aspects. Now, some numbers are truly gargantuan and should be concerning - but like all things that bring shock value, numbers can always be twisted in ways that can make something minor seem huge.
I will illustrate this with an almost absurd example.
Humanity as a whole wastes 11.5 Olympic swimming pool's worth of drinks per year by not drinking everything!!!
Imagine that the equivalent of everyone on earth buys a 1 liter carton of milk (or some other beverage), as you might have experienced, it is almost impossible to get out every last drop, so assume that on average 20ml are left in each one.
Let us then say that everyone who buys this finishes a carton every other day. Since there are nearly 8 billion people on earth, now we can go on and perform a clickbaity calculation.
0.02 Liters wasted * 8 billion cartons * 365/2 days = approximately 29 million liters, that's a big number but incomprehensible really, so like good authors we make this value more tangible by measuring it in Olympic swimming pool equivalents.
An Olympic pool has 2.5 million liters, so we simply divide by this number and get that....
Humanity wastes 11.5 Olympic swimming pool's worth of drinks per year by not finishing all their milk-like bevarages that come in cartons!
Now this number will elicit different emotions from different people, but clearly this is not actually a value that can be 'optimized' away by switching to less lossy mediums of drink transport. So when you see these giant numbers it is always a good idea to divide by the population of the earth that might do that thing and the amount of times that action can be expected to be taken by the people over the course of a year before getting upset. Sometimes you'll find that you should be more upset than a post might imply!
This is the end of my PSA, sorry for the rant :P
| Viewed: |
97 times |
| Added: |
1 month ago
14 Apr 2024 21:05 CEST
|
|
|
