The Second Greatest Shortcoming of the Human Race

Some blog followers might be interested in a recent post “The Second Greatest Shortcoming of the Human Race” [Hake (2012c)]. The abstract reads:

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ABSTRACT: Among the “Twenty-eight Quotes Relevant to Overpopulation” in my post “L.A. Times Population Report: Beyond 7 Billion - Fighting the Last War?” [Hake (2012b)] at http://bit.ly/TeOpJj is one by biologist Joel Cohen from his NYT piece “Seven Billion” [Cohen (2011)] at http://nyti.ms/SU6gFM.

Cohen, in a masterful online talk “You are 25 100-Watt Light Bulbs, Burning All Day” at http://bit.ly/VI86rj stated that: “If you have 3 people in a room and it gets warm, it’s because they’re generating 300 watts of heat – it’s like having a 300 watt light bulb going on. If you multiply 100 watts by 6.8 billion, the number of people on the planet, you find that the whole power generation of the human species is about 0.68 terawatts - a terawatt is a lot of watts: there's kilowatts, megawatts, gigawatts, and terawatts - so that's a lot!" . . . . .[[i.e., it's 10^3, 10^6, 10^9, and 10^12 watts]]. . . . .

According to Al Bartlett (2004): “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” I would propose a corollary: The second greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the meaning of large numbers. See e.g. the You Tube video “Powers of Ten” at http://bit.ly/T0UyKM from the Eames Office.
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To access the complete 10 kB post please click on http://bit.ly/T0nCk6.

Richard Hake, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Indiana University
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REFERENCES [URL's shortened by http://bit.ly/ and accessed on 16 Dec 2012.
Hake, R.R. 2012a. “L.A. Times Population Report: Beyond 7 Billion,” online on the OPEN! AERA-L archives at http://bit.ly/Ufro6y. Post of 5 Dec 2012 14:23:20-0800 to AERA-L and Net-Gold. The abstract and link to the complete post are being transmitted to several discussion lists and are also on my blog “Hake'sEdStuff” at http://bit.ly/YBNFUU with a provision for comments.

Hake, R.R. 2012b. “L.A. Times Population Report: Beyond 7 Billion - Fighting the Last War?” online on the OPEN! online on the OPEN! AERA-L archives at http://bit.ly/TeOpJj. Post of 13 Dec 2012 16:14:29-0800 to AERA-L and Net-Gold. The abstract and link to the complete post are being transmitted to several discussion lists and are also on my blog “Hake'sEdStuff” at http://bit.ly/W2EV8u with a provision for comments.

Hake, R.R. 2012c. “The Second Greatest Shortcoming of the Human Race,” online on the OPEN! AERA-L archives at http://bit.ly/T0nCk6. Post of 15 Dec 2012 16:53:57-0800 to AERA-L and Net-Gold. The abstract and link to the complete post are being transmitted to several discussion lists. See also the precursors Hake (2012a,b).