Hair

People have a lot of hair.
The average human head has around 100 thousand hairs.
Hair doesn't seem to grow very fast though. Head hair grows on average half an inch per month.
But that builds up. Half an inch per month, twelve months a year, 100 thousand hairs per head.
Every year, the average human head grows almost ten miles of hair.
That means in an average life time, a person will grow well over 600 miles of it.
If you laid it out and started walking, it would take 8 and a half days of non stop walking to get to the other end.

This Blog; by the Numbers

Hello friends and followers.
Today's post won't be like the normal posts.
Today, I want to say thank you.
Let's look at the numbers I'm thanking you for.
This blog has 177 followers.
The posts on this blog have received 885 comments.
This blog has been shared on facebook and twitter.
And finally, this blog has been viewed 4,521 times.
Thank you.

Four-year-old Painter

Aelita Andre is having her premier art show in New York today. She is four years old.
Her paintings are selling at around 10 thousand dollars a piece.
That's pretty good money for a four year old.
If she can make a new abstract painting everyday for the next 60 years she will have earned almost a quarter billion dollars.
Unfortunately that probably won't happen, because almost every child prodigy grows up to be an almost regular adult.

Lady Gaga

Lady Gaga, among other things, is the most followed person on twitter, with more than 10 million followers.
What if these people where actually following her, like walking behind her in a single file line?
Assuming that these people didn't want to invade each other's personal space, that line would be almost 6000 miles long.
If you wanted to drive the fastest car on the planet, one that goes 258 miles per hour, past this entire line, it would take you almost an entire day.

Proof

In mathematics, it is really hard to prove things.
Almost 75 years ago, a mathematician name Collatz made a conjecture,  that seem pretty simple.
He said take any number. If it's even, divide it by two. If it's odd, multiply it by three and add one. Then repeat. He said no matter what number you started with, you'd end up at 1 eventually.
As it turns out, no one has been able to prove it.
But it has been tested a lot. In fact, it's been tested for almost 6 billion billion different numbers, and it's worked for every one of them.
That's a lot of tests.
If everyone on the planet tested one of these every second, it would take 27 years for us to test that many.
Funny thing is, mathematicians don't really care how many tests you've run.
They want proof.

The Debt: Part 2

I've talked about how much debt the United States is in before, but I feel that this number is merits a revisiting.
For a few reasons.
First, it's an important number in politics.
Second, it's a very hard to understand number.
And third, it's getting bigger. In fact, since my last post about it 12 days ago, the debt has grown by 19 billion dollars, bringing the grand total to 14,408,119,076,113 dollars.
So how much money is that?
Let's say you have the amount of money that the United States owes.
And you have it in 100 thousand dollar bills.
Assuming these bills weigh the standard 1 gram that every American bill weighs, you'd have 317 thousand pounds of 100 thousand dollar bills.
A standard dump truck can handle 32 metric tons.
That means it would take 5 dump trucks to move the entire debt. In 100000 dollar bills.

Oprah

It has now been one weeks since the final episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show aired.
4561 episodes were produced in total, running 45 minutes each.
So what if you wanted to have an all-inclusive Oprah marathon?
Well obviously you couldn't do it all in one sitting. Maybe you watch 6 hours a day. 3 hours before work, and 3 after.
It would take you 1.5 years to watch the whole thing.
1.5 years of watching Oprah six hours a day.