Maeda's SIMPLICITY

Darfur

Darfur Darfur Darfur Darfur ...

Looking at the current estimated death toll in Darfur of 400,000 people is sad and disturbing. The number 400,000 in computer terms is 400K. In the technology sphere we freely work with numbers in the mega-digits (10⁶) and giga-digits (10⁹) so the number can seem quite small. Numerical systems help to vastly simplify a statistic -- for instance when thought in terms of the millions, 400 thousand people dead is just 0.4 million people. Given our world population projection we are at 6,515,847,379 people. Thus looking at the total number of people now gone in Darfur -- 400 thousand people -- a simple analysis reveals that just 0.006% are now dead in the total world population.

Simplicity is really no good when it hides important complexities.

400 thousand people. Six letters in the word "Darfur." That is the word "Darfur" written 66,666.66 times where each letter signifies a single person.

66,666.66 words. Adding in a space per word, and then calculating the average word as 5 characters gives us approximately 93 thousand words. The average number of words per page is 250, which gives us 373 pages of text where each letter is a single person that is dead.

82 characters. The number of characters going into a simple C-program to print out the word "Darfur" 66,666 times:

#include

main()
{
int i;
for(i=0;i<66666;i++)
printf("Darfur ");
}

465 kilobytes. A plaintext file that makes 400K dead a bit more real. But scroll through it and it all looks monotonously the same. There's nothing there to feel. Perhaps that is the problem. The world is not at all simple.

Posted by maeda at May 14, 2006 02:06 PM