Numb3rs

Did you know that 31 million plastic bottles can be produced from 17 million barrels of oil?

Really. You don't believe me? What's that, you did the math?

Ok, you got me, I lied. If what I said was true, that would be one barrel of oil to make 2 plastic bottles. Pretty absurd, right? Actually, one barrel of oil makes 2,000 plastic bottles. That sounds better, doesn't it? What I meant to say was that 31 billion plastic bottles can be produced from 17 million barrels of oil.

That was a mistake published in the LA Times. And according to another LA Times article, "the million-billion mistake is among the most common in journalism." The article goes on to lament that the collective numeric literacy rate in America is "appallingly low".

I agree that most people do not have a good feel for numbers. Take simple quantitative estimations: how many feet is one block? How many liters of water fill up your bath tub? How tall is the tree in front of your house? In basic physics classes they try to teach you to get a feel for orders of magnitude and size. The problem is that up until taking those physics classes, I perhaps got most of my experience back in the second grade when I guessed how many jelly beans were in a jar.

There are some great visualizations of numeric quantities that I've come across. On his blog Jay Epperhart posted a cool visualization of what ONE BILLION means. And he uses the universe, with all the galaxies containing their stars and planets, to do it. Not only did I get a reference point for the number one billion, but I also got a small peek at how insignificantly small and humble Earth is. Also, xkcd has a great guide to visualizing numbers with the metric system

It's a pity that we aren't very numerically literate, because math uses numbers all the time. We're literate in English, of course, but not in the universal language that is math.

"I am convinced that the act of thinking logically cannot possibly be natural to the human mind," writes astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson in his book The Sky Is Not the Limit. As math is based on the rules of logic, it is reassuring to know that for the vast majority of people, it doesn't come naturally. Like most other endeavors, it takes effort and practice to begin to appreciate the underlying beauty.

The stigma attached to math is that it is tedious and impenetrable. In his book Tyson mentions a publisher who commented that when writing a book about science, every equation included in the book will decrease the potential buyers by one half. And yes, equations are intimidating. Why make the effort if they are foreign to you?

But what if the education in America prepared us to appreciate the beauty of math, i.e. to be numerically literate? We were forced to read __________(insert tedious and boring book required for high school English) to better appreciate the English language, but we didn't get the same rigor and results to be well-versed in the language of numbers.