Round Numbers

Round Numbers

I really don’t want to push my luck, but it seems we’ve reached a perfectly round number of subscribers. So let me tell you a story.

Many, many years ago, an Indian shah was bored. Then a wise man came and presented him with the game of chess. The shah was thrilled and offered the man anything he wanted. The wise man asked for as much rice as the shah could place on a chessboard using the following rule: on the first square, put one grain of rice; on the second, two grains; and so on. Each next square should contain twice as many grains as the previous one.

I don’t actually know how this story ends because, obviously, 2**64 is quite a big number, and the shah could not possibly give the wise man everything he had asked for.

But this story gives us exactly the picture I started this post with.

Yesterday our community covered one row of this proverbial chessboard. Today — one cell of the next row. That’s the strange property of fast-growing populations.

As far as I remember, about 30% of all people who have ever lived are alive right now. So if you hear the joke “100% of people who eat cucumbers died,” don’t trust it. No more than 70%.