5 Ways to Actually Understand Very Large Numbers
131,968
Published 2022-04-29
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All Comments (21)
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Correction! I was wrong about how long it would take to drive to the moon. It's around 150 days to the drive to the moon and around 150 years to drive to the sun. WEIRD COINCIDENCE!
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“Including all of babies” is a lovely population qualifier because it makes me think of all of the babies.
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The circumference of the Earth isn’t “luckily” almost exactly 40,000 km. The meter was defined so that the circumference of the Earth (at least of the meridian that goes through Paris) would be exactly 40,000 km. The only reason this is not exact are calculation errors when the measurements were made, in the late 18th century.
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"This video maybe should have been 15 minutes long so...just watch it 3 times and I promise you'll get it!!!" Good description. I will be rewatching at least twice to comprehend this
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In case anyone is wondering why Hank chose $44B dollars when that seems like a pretty arbitrary number, that's the amount that Elon Musk is ostensibly going to pay to buy Twitter. Dividing that by a chosen number of people is a very interesting metric...
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Are you gonna debate Erik or not? This is important
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Dang. I knew a Hank Green/Internet Comment Etiquette crossover was too good to be true. Now I need to find something else to do with this rocket ship...
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It's so lovely seeing Hank's tweets come to life.
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one thing that will never get in my head is how miniscule an atom is and just how many are in a handful of sand
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My work involves communicating around data and so I found this really interesting and thought provoking! Thank you :) To kind of back up one of your points, I have learned that people relate much more to a data point if it is in terms of people. For example, if you say that 1 in 7 people are unemployed, it's more comprehensible than saying 14% of people are unemployed. Funny how our brains work!
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i think there might have been a calculation error with the earth/moon distance calculation. 250,000 miles at 70 mph should only take 149 days. My mother drove 250,000 miles on her car in 15 years and she wasn't driving 1/3rd of the day every day :)
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This is an incredibly valuable in concise explanation, especially in the current world climate where understanding what reporting on large numbers and data containing large numbers actually means is increasingly important to the informed human experience.
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Where's Erik's comment?
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I've always thought of myself as being bad at understanding numbers, but between watching this video and a book I read recently (Making Numbers Count) I think maybe being bad at understanding numbers is normal because we talk about them as numbers instead of things we actually understand?
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I'm REALLY bad with numbers (dyscalculia). From now on when someone gives me a price (like how my family keeps talking about the price of housing) I'm just gonna say, "How many books is that?" Because books, I definitely understand.
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As an astrophysicist, I just........ get a feel for the large the numbers eventually! In the end there's still a hierarchical organisation somewhere, but I know A LOT of large numbers that I can compare other numbers to
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This video is coming to me the same day I was made fun of for measuring Chile in terms of California. “Americans will do anything to avoid the metric system,” they said, which would be fair except for the fact that both 2700 miles and 4300 km mean nothing to me
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We need to see this debate, DEBATE
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I just started a data analysis job and this video couldn't have come to me at a better time.
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Few years ago I saw your chemistry crash course, I was about eight then. It was my gateway to youtube and internet as whole. Thanks for such a beautiful start to my journey discovering the internet!!
