Dec 5 2022 - Counting Celebrities

 

It isn't so much about counting things as finding ways of estimating the number of something,   One Wired article tried to figure out how many celebrities there were in the world.  It  looked to the category of Living People on Wikipedia.  There are 604,174 pages on notable people.  At the time the total global population was just over 7 billion so the fraction of living famous people was 0.000086.  If the calculation was just for English-speaking population the number comes out to between 1 in 10,000 and 5 in 10,000.   That's how many celebrities there are - a lot to track if you are in the celebrity-tracking business.  You might want to count other things besides our planet's population and celebrities.  I found the world meters  site and it is constantly counting things for us - current population, births, deaths, government spending, new books, newspapers circulated, emails sent today, blog post written, forest loss, undernourished people, overweight people, water used this year, energy used,, oil pumped, days to the end of oil, days to the end of coal, deaths caused by cancer, number cigarettes smoked today,  This is the site I was looking at:  https://www.worldometers.info/ We might wonder about  who were history's great "counters." In today's terminology it would statisticians.  It turns out that Florence Nightingale was one of them.  Nightingale was a member of the Royal Statistical Society and one of the first people to collect statistics on health policy.  Her work led to health policy reforms in 19th-century Britain and saved the lives of countless British soldiers.   She presented the  statistics of soldier deaths from preventable causes  (such as unsanitary conditions) in a graphical pie chart diagram, making the information instantaneously understandable.   The diagram is now called a polar-area diagram.  She was one of the first statisticians to represent data in diagrams.

This is a part of a screen installation located in downtown Toronto.   The second picture shows how it is installed along a walkway.

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Mar 9 2020 - Counting Flower

That's right, Victoria is in the middle of its annual light-hearted promotion of counting flowers.   While it is light-hearted, I would expect there is great determination to beat last year's count.  I went over to the twitter feed and the total was almost 45,000,000,000 on Friday.  You can check out the twitter feed with beautiful blooming landscapes here: https://twitter.com/search?q=%23flowercount&src=typed_query The hashtag is #flowercount to see all the posts of trees, shrubs and flowers in bloom. There is a great display at Instagram demonstrating to all non-Victorians what makes Victoria so wonderful.  Could we predict that there is the possibility in the future that we would look at the latest update on Coronavirus before going out to count flowers? There are now before and after photos of famous tourist attractions in Europe. The article showing the photos is HERE. And that made me think of the immediate vacation plans for March Break to popular U.S. destinations like Disney World in Orlando?  The Washington Post had an article about children making a cancer charity visit to Orlando with this statement: "the virus wasn't anyone's top concern".  Following that statement, the article goes on to outline the declared state of emergency on Sunday, the death of two patients in Florida, and that 278 people being monitored. I wonder what the tipping point is?  What would it take for you to not travel or cancel travel? Which locations would you worry about?  How many cases would concern you?  These are questions that will be with us for a while now. Our picture today celebrates Spring in Victoria.

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Countdowns

Counting down is something we like to do.  Those of us who were there for the "Space Era" know about "T-Minus" - the countdown to launch.   During countdown: Aerospace personnel bring the rocket vehicle to the launch site and load it with payload and propellants; Launch-center computers communicate with sensors in the rocket, which monitor important systems on the launch vehicle and payload; Launch personnel monitor the weather and wait for the launch window; Security personnel prevent unauthorized persons from entering the "keep-out" area. Each mission requires approximately 100 procedure books. The same generation will remember early Films and their start with a countdown sequence printed on the head leader so that the film could be synchronized with sound. I hadn't realized that the countdown is in units of feet rather than time. Our implied countdown today is Spring, as we look at spring flowers.