Just playing with the numbers.
Population trivia.
A very crude estimate suggests that about 1,000 million of the world’s 7,500 million are “only” children and have no siblings.
Archive for the ‘Trivia’ Category
More mothers than fathers in the world
March 12, 2018Never mind the quality
February 22, 2018I am old enough now to be allowed to be cynical:
Being 70
February 19, 2018So, I turned threescore and ten last week.
The Bible (Psalms 90)
The days of our years are threescore years and ten;
and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years,
yet is their strength labor and sorrow;
for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.Shakespeare (Macbeth, II, 4)
Old man: Threescore and ten I can remember well:
Within the volume of which time I have seen
Hours dreadful and things strange; but this sore night
Hath trifled former knowings.
The angels were not visible but there was celestial music all day. Everything I ate tasted like an ambrosia gel and everything I drank was like a single-malt, 18 year old nectar. My understandings of all things philosophical turned profound. The mysteries of life, the universe and everything were revealed. It is not just coincidence that 42 plus the singularity is a prime and exactly half of 86. Ytterbium (Yb) has atomic number 70 and is a lanthanide. There have to be 52 cards in a pack because there are 52 weeks in a year. There must be 13 cards in a suit to account for the missing 13th month. I finally understood why there are 7 days in a week and humans have five digits on each limb. I solved the last missing theorem. A teenager’s speech was almost intelligible and didn’t turn me off. A car stopped in heavy traffic and allowed me to merge into the queue. And it snowed all day.
At 70, the answer to life, the universe and everything on any limb and on any day of the week becomes obvious.
Apart from that it was just another day.
In Sweden, to be 70 is no big deal. Around 16% of the population is 70 or over. In Japan 20% of the population is 70 and over. But in India and China only about 6% are over 70. Globally, the over-70s are just under 6% of the population.
Decadent or depraved
December 11, 2017So are we decadent or are we depraved?
Decadence
dissipation, dissoluteness, degeneracy, debauchery, corruption, depravity, vice, sinfulness, perversion, moral decay, immorality, lack of morals, lack of principles, lack of restraint, lack of control, lack of self-control, immoderateness, intemperance, licentiousness, wantonness, self-indulgence, hedonism, epicureanism, voluptuousness
Depravity
corruption, corruptness, vice, perversion, pervertedness, deviance, degeneracy, degradation, immorality, shamelessness, debauchery, dissipation, dissoluteness, turpitude, loucheness, profligacy, licentiousness, lewdness, lasciviousness, salaciousness, lechery, lecherousness, prurience, obscenity, indecency, libertinism, sordidness; wickedness, sinfulness, vileness, baseness, iniquity, nefariousness, criminality, viciousness, brutality, brutishness
I suspect it is decadence.
Bit it is surely one or the other.
Five decades
December 8, 2017One ages and one gets nostalgic.
The past gets compressed into some kind of a zip-file in my memory and sometimes the file is difficult to open.
But five decades of a working life does not take much space to summarise.
Political Dyslexia
November 7, 2017
Some marvellous inventions that changed my world (and are now obsolete)
September 3, 2017Marvellous inventions that changed my world and which are now obsolete. (Dates are when I came across the invention).
- 1959 – My first fountain pen
- 1960 – first biro (not quite obsolete yet)
- 1961 – Kodak box camera
- 1962 – birthday present of a Sony transistor radio
- 1963 – My own book of log tables
- 1964 – a Grundig reel-to-reel tape recorder (which I could play backwards!)
- 1966 – a Faber-Castell slide rule
- 1967 – allowed to use a Curta mechanical rotary calculator
- 1968 – a Kodak Instamatic
- 1969 – a casette tape recorder
- 1972 – a Sinclair pocket calculator
- 1974 – allowed to share a Hewlett-Packard 9100A desktop
- 1975 – allowed to use a PDP-11 mini-computer
- 1976 – using a Telex machine
- 1977 – a Sony Betamax video player
- 1978 – a Polaroid camera
- 1980 – used a facsimile machine (G1)
- 1983 – first PC (not obsolete yet)
- 1984 – used a fax machine (G3)
- 1989 – First Nokia talkphone (model now well obsolete)
image birmingham history
and the rest is still unfolding.
Sunday morning blues
August 27, 2017The world is a round hole and I am square.
In the galaxy of my childhood
June 30, 2017Long away and far ago, in the galaxy of my childhood, in a space-time continuum that has ceased to be:
- Nothing was impossible,
- Banks were known to handle cash,
- customers were always right,
- shop-keepers thanked you for your custom,
- restaurants were happy for you to eat and dawdle,
- the milkman brought the cow around every morning and evening to be milked,
- coffee beans were roasted and ground every morning for the day’s consumption,
- if it wasn’t raining it was hot,
- if it wasn’t snowing it was cold,
- ice cream and chocolate bars came once a week,
- cakes were for birthdays,
- a girl could be a tomboy and remain a girl,
- scientists were skeptical,
- the postman was always on time,
- extreme weather was just extreme weather,
- newspapers told the truth, and
- everything was possible
Disillusionment
June 29, 2017It is one of the worst feelings one can experience. To have reality intrude rudely on illusions one has cherished.
And the worst of the worst is when it is another person who is the disillusionment. When somebody turns out to be not quite what they seem to be.
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