Fear of Math and Statistics Results in "Innumeracy"
A biology teacher called me a few days ago and told me I messed up a number in a recent column. Because of a lazy conversion, I wrote purple light measured four ten-thousandths of a meter from wave crest to wave crest, instead of the correct four ten-millionths of a meter.
He went on to explain my mistake, but my mind went numb because I couldn't visualize the difference between the two numbers. The teacher bemoaned the fact that more people don't have a grasp on the significance of large or small numbers. He reminded me of mathematician John Allen Paulos, who wrote the best-selling book Innumeracy.
Paulos argues that many Americans are "innumerants" who squeak by with just enough math to get out of school and then cover their ears and hum when presented with anything more mathematically complex than balancing a checkbook. He defined innumeracy as "an inability to deal comfortably with the fundamental notions of number and chance."
Paulos makes scary numbers easier to grasp by putting them in the context of everyday life. For 100,000, he visualizes the number of printed words in a good-sized novel. He calculates it takes 11-and-one-half days for one million seconds to pass. For a clock to tick away a billion seconds, it takes 32 years. One trillion seconds ago, Neanderthal man (and woman) walked the earth. The 1,000,000,000,000 seconds since then add up to 31,709 years.
Paulos prefers scientific notation to using all those zeros. One trillion becomes 1012, as 10N is 1 with N zeroes following it. For minuscule numbers, 10-N is 1 divided by 10N. He uses scientific notation to tidy up numbers; for example, human hair grows at the rate of 10-8 miles per hour, or .00000001 miles per hour, and Americans smoke about 5 x 1011 cigarettes a year, or 500,000,000,000.
For an example of the ease of measuring volume with a macabre twist, Paulos calculates the volume of all the human blood in the world. He figures since the average adult male carries six quarts of blood, the average woman slightly less, and children much less, it could be estimated that each person has a gallon of blood. Five billion people on earth equals five billion gallons of blood. He built an imaginary wall around New York City's Central Park, which has an area of about 1.3 square miles, and by knowing there are about 7.5 gallons of liquid to each cubic foot, he calculated that all the blood in the world would turn the park into a 20-foot deep, red pool.
One of Paulos' pet peeves is the ignorance many of us have to probabilities, such as when someone cancels a trip overseas because of widely publicized terrorist attacks but thinks nothing of the risk associated with driving down the street. By his tally, 17 American travelers were killed by terrorists abroad in 1985, but 28 million Americans traveled out of the country, for a one-in-1.6 million chance of death by terrorist. He compared that to the somewhat frightening annual chance of death by auto accident in the U.S.---one in 5,300.
To close out with a relevant Alaska example of numeracy in action, I found a fact sheet done by the Chena Hot Springs Research Department on moose nuggets, the familiar by-product produced when moose eat dry shoots and twigs in the fall, winter and spring. Someone at the resort calculated that the average moose produces 380 nuggets a day for nine months, which equals about 100,000 nuggets a year.
According to the fact sheet, there are 174,000 moose in Alaska. Multiplying the moose by their nugget total equals 17,400,000,000 nuggets a year. If they were stacked end to end, the pile would stand 71,258 times as high as Mt. McKinley.
