Numbers

Google Voice integration with Gmail, Facebook introduces us to places. Important announcements to be sure and lettering will be and has been given to these topics. I will waste no more of your mindshare, instead let us play a numbers game, and I assure you there will be a point at the end of all this.
 
Let’s start with the number 5. This is an easy number to grasp, we have five fingers on each hand as well as 5 toes on each foot. Five is a good number, one we can easily grasp. At five gathers are still rather small, personal, and intimate. Everyone can easily interact with each other with only 4 others around us.
 
Let us next take a sizable jump to 50, 10x, 900% increase, 45 more. This would approximately the amount of songs on 10 cds, there are more characters in the first sentence of this blog. 50 can become a vague number, how many people at your last dinner party? A cousin’s wedding?  Or waiting in line to see Justin Bieber? Estimating 50 can become difficult.
 
Continuing our increase by 10x lets think about 500. How much is 500? Perhaps you make $500 a day or a week? How many people were at the same restaurant at the same time as you the last time you ate out? Likely less than 500. What is 500? At this point it begins to become very hazy and fuzzy. One can estimate based upon generalities that a 2 page double spaced essay is 500 words. What if they used size 13 font, and increase the spacing between lines by .05 inches? Could you notice? Could you make an accurate guess? The last concert I went to likely had around 500 people in attendance.
 
Jump to 5000, what is 5 thousand? A 20 page essay with standard spacing and font size, or the amount of people in your zip code? Now we have reached a point where visualizing the number is itself problematic 50 thousand words? A short novel.   500,000 words a very long novel .
 
Lets make one final jump, and this is to our target number in this exercise. 5 billion. 5,000,000,000. Seems small when written, but it takes just over 158 and half years for 5 billion seconds to tick by. No one has ever lived 5 billion seconds. And yet there are now 5 billion devices connected to the internet. In a little over 40 years the internet has seen growth that is beyond anything we can really comprehend. How many thousands of years did it take for the world population to reach 5 billion. Even being generous and just discussion the electronic age, which is maybe 120 years long currently, we have connected items to the internet faster than 1 per second. Let us pause for a moment on that…and the rate of connection is only going to increase. The growth rate of our greatest invention is staggering…
 
Have fun counting!