Okay, you can tell this isn’t going to be my most precise piece of maths since I wrote a feature on how to model the UK economy in Excel*. And perhaps the first clue to how many decimal places of accuracy I’m aiming for will come when you reach the word “Wikipedia”.<\/p>\n
Wikipedia – that didn’t take long; I thought you’d trust me at least a little longer – says the world’s population is growing at 75 million people per year. Now, I make that 0.007 people every minute. So that’s 1,428.6 minutes per person. Most people will tell you it takes three minutes and nine months to make a person, but you heard the truth here first: it’s 23 hours, 48 minutes, 57 seconds.<\/p>\n
Now, that leaves you 11 minutes and 3 seconds to relax at the end of the day, but that’s not what I’m looking for.<\/p>\n
Instead, there’s a news report<\/a> today saying that spam email senders get one response for every 12.5 million emails they send. <\/p>\n And I can’t join the dots. I so want to be able to say to you that therefore this means there is one sucker born every 9.7 seconds or something, but I’ve got one statistic in this hand, the other in that one, and I can’t bring the two together. I think that part of it is that I’m missing an episode here, we don’t have a comparative time basis for the two: do I need to know how long it takes ’em to send 12.5m emails? I think I do. I think I need to know how many they send per annum to conclusively figure it out.<\/p>\n Unless you know better. And can now take part in this Build a Reasonably Pointless But Faux Informative Punchline contest that I’ve just decided to come up with.<\/p>\n People, I got CSE grade 1 Maths: I’m far from proud of this, but I’m just saying. Any help welcomed.<\/p>\n William Okay, you can tell this isn’t going to be my most precise piece of maths since I wrote a feature … Continue reading
*PS I really did do that, model the UK economy in Excel version 5. I think I’ve told you this before, but the economy’s been on my mind a bit recently, I’ve been carrying some worry about whether my maths in that feature had any impact anywhere.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"