[conspire] On setting records

[Rick Moen]

Thread starts at
https://twitter.com/kurtpankau/status/1478602729404645377 :

  So... there were over a million new COVID cases reported yesterday in
  the US, and I want to take a moment to marvel at just how gigantic that
  number is.  I have a degree in math, and big numbers are genuinely 
  incomprehensible, so let's see if we can break that down.

  There are 86400 seconds in a day.  For a million people to be diagnosed
  yesterday, that means that roughly 12 people in this country were
  diagnosed every second.  Yesterday.

  Let's say people started getting diagnosed yesterday at 12:01am and
  kept going, 1 a minute, until a million people had been reported.  It
  would finish up in June.  That many cases got reported YESTERDAY.
  (End of June, beginning of July, really.  I'm back-of-the-napkining
  this.)

  Side note: the most important skill in all of mathematics is being able
  make reasonable approximations.

  Anywho.  Let's come at this from another angle.  There are just shy of
  330 million of us in this country.  That means that 1 out of every 330
  people got diagnosed YESTERDAY.  That's 3/10's of a percent, for those 
  playing along at home, which doesn't sound like a lot, but it really is.

  Pick a day of the year.  Any day.  Every person with that day as their 
  birthday got diagnosed with COVID yesterday.

  Let's say you're a social person with a lot of active, healthy
  relationships.  How many people do you know?  Well, if you buy the
  monkeysphere theory, the answer is about 150.  That means that there's 
  a 50% chance that you know someone personally who got diagnosed YESTERDAY!
  If they all lived in one place, that city would be 2/5 as populous as
  the St. Louis metro area.  That's the entire state of Delaware.  The
  entire state of Delaware got diagnosed YESTERDAY!

  If you worked a $7.25/hr job for 40 hours a week, it would take you 67
  years to earn as many dollars as people who got diagnosed with COVID
  yesterday.  If you filled Dodger Stadium to its maximum seating
  capacity, it would take almost 18 of them to hold the number of people
  who got diagnosed YESTERDAY.  7 times as many people got diagnosed
  with COVID in the US yesterday as there are members of Mensa in the
  whole world.

  Seriously, this is breaking my brain right now.  AND IT SHOULD BE
  BREAKING YOURS, TOO!

  The problem is that anything over 10,000 is just noise.  We can't wrap
  our heads around it.  Here's a picture of Obama's second inauguration.
  That many people got diagnosed yesterday.  [pic very full of people]

Reference: 
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/region/united-states
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/04/us-global-record-more-than-1m-daily-covid-cases