Oh book, what are you doing to me
May. 18th, 2008 02:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beelikejYesterday on the train to Amsterdam I was crying. ME! CRYING! I'm not talking getting a little emo or sad; there were tears streaming down my face. I was reading an essay by Hofstadter about default sexism in language and I've NEVER met/read anyone who understood so perfectly why this is such a big issue to me. I need to process all my thoughts on the subject before I'm able to coherently post about it. In the meantime, here is an exerpt from a more mathematical chapter:
"A computer doing a billion operations per seconds would really be moving along. Imagine breaking up one second into as many tiny fragments as there are seconds in 30 years. That is how tiny a nanosecond - a billionth of 1 second - is. To a computer, a second is a lifetime! Of course, the computer is dawdling compared with the events inside the atoms that compose it. Take one atom. A typical electron circling a typical nucleus makes about 1015 orbits per second, which is to say, a million orbits per nanosecond. From an electron's-eye point of view, a computer is as slow as molasses in January.[...]
At the other end of the scale, there is the slow, stately twirling of our galaxy, which makes a leisurely complete turn every 200 million years or so. And within the solar system, the planet Pluto takes about 250 years to complete an orbit of the sun. Speaking of the sun, it is about a million miles across and has a mass on the order of 1030 kilograms. The earth is a featherweight in comparison, a mere 1024 kilograms. [...]
These large and small numbers are so far beyond our ordinary comprehension that it is virtually impossible to keep on being more amazed. The numbers are genuinely beyond understanding - unless one has developed a vivid feeling for various exponents. And even with such an intuition, it is hard to give the universe its awesome due for being so extraordinarily huge and at the same time so extraordinarily fine-grained. Number numbness sets in early these days. Most people seem entirely unfazed by words such as "billion" and "trillion"; they simply become synonyms for the meaningless "zillion".
This hit me particularly hard a few times after I had finished a draft of this column [May 1982]. I was reading the paper, and I came across an article on the subject of nerve gas. It stated that President Reagan expected the expenditures for nerve gas to come to about $800 million in 1983, and $1.4 billion in 1984. I was upset, but I caught myself being thankful that it was not $10 billion or $100 billion. Then, all at once, I really felt ashamed of myself. That guy had some nerve gas! How could I have been relieved by the figure of a "mere" $1.4 billion? How could my thoughts have become so dissociated from the underlying reality? One billion for nerve gas is not mereley lamentable; it is odious. We cannot afford to become number-number than we are. We need to be willing to be jerked out of our apathy, because this kind of "joke" is in very poor taste.
Survival of our species is the name of the game. I don't really care if the number of mosquitos in Africa is greater or less than the number of pennies in the gross national product. [...] I don't care a hoot about pointless, silly images of colossal magnitudes. What I do care about is what a billion dollars represents in terms of buying power: lunches for all the schoolkids in New York for a year, a hundred libraries, fifty jumbo jets, [...] and so on.
[...] I want people to understand the very real consequences of those very surreal numbers bandied about in the newspaper headlines as interchangeably as movie stars' names in the scandal sheets. [...] At bottom, we are dealing with perceptual questions, but ones with life-and-death consequences!"
Taken from Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern, Section II, Chapter 6: Sense & Society: On Number Numbness
It's quite difficult to find a fragment to summarize the awesome pieces. I hope this makes sense. You are invited to discuss the subject or point out typos:) Feel free to comment with a ? or a request for an explanation/addition;)
"A computer doing a billion operations per seconds would really be moving along. Imagine breaking up one second into as many tiny fragments as there are seconds in 30 years. That is how tiny a nanosecond - a billionth of 1 second - is. To a computer, a second is a lifetime! Of course, the computer is dawdling compared with the events inside the atoms that compose it. Take one atom. A typical electron circling a typical nucleus makes about 1015 orbits per second, which is to say, a million orbits per nanosecond. From an electron's-eye point of view, a computer is as slow as molasses in January.[...]
At the other end of the scale, there is the slow, stately twirling of our galaxy, which makes a leisurely complete turn every 200 million years or so. And within the solar system, the planet Pluto takes about 250 years to complete an orbit of the sun. Speaking of the sun, it is about a million miles across and has a mass on the order of 1030 kilograms. The earth is a featherweight in comparison, a mere 1024 kilograms. [...]
These large and small numbers are so far beyond our ordinary comprehension that it is virtually impossible to keep on being more amazed. The numbers are genuinely beyond understanding - unless one has developed a vivid feeling for various exponents. And even with such an intuition, it is hard to give the universe its awesome due for being so extraordinarily huge and at the same time so extraordinarily fine-grained. Number numbness sets in early these days. Most people seem entirely unfazed by words such as "billion" and "trillion"; they simply become synonyms for the meaningless "zillion".
This hit me particularly hard a few times after I had finished a draft of this column [May 1982]. I was reading the paper, and I came across an article on the subject of nerve gas. It stated that President Reagan expected the expenditures for nerve gas to come to about $800 million in 1983, and $1.4 billion in 1984. I was upset, but I caught myself being thankful that it was not $10 billion or $100 billion. Then, all at once, I really felt ashamed of myself. That guy had some nerve gas! How could I have been relieved by the figure of a "mere" $1.4 billion? How could my thoughts have become so dissociated from the underlying reality? One billion for nerve gas is not mereley lamentable; it is odious. We cannot afford to become number-number than we are. We need to be willing to be jerked out of our apathy, because this kind of "joke" is in very poor taste.
Survival of our species is the name of the game. I don't really care if the number of mosquitos in Africa is greater or less than the number of pennies in the gross national product. [...] I don't care a hoot about pointless, silly images of colossal magnitudes. What I do care about is what a billion dollars represents in terms of buying power: lunches for all the schoolkids in New York for a year, a hundred libraries, fifty jumbo jets, [...] and so on.
[...] I want people to understand the very real consequences of those very surreal numbers bandied about in the newspaper headlines as interchangeably as movie stars' names in the scandal sheets. [...] At bottom, we are dealing with perceptual questions, but ones with life-and-death consequences!"
Taken from Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern, Section II, Chapter 6: Sense & Society: On Number Numbness
It's quite difficult to find a fragment to summarize the awesome pieces. I hope this makes sense. You are invited to discuss the subject or point out typos:) Feel free to comment with a ? or a request for an explanation/addition;)