Visualizing our consumption

Found this story via a CNET post. It is one of those neat, scary, weird, sad kind of things. Trying to visualize how much we consume as a country is a pretty monumental task. As a mathematician, I would always try to describe things with numbers. The problem is that when numbers get too large, many people have no reference point for them and the numbers become meaningless. That's why people come up with ways to describe things based on how high of a stack they might make or how many times they could circle the earth if put end-to-end. Anyway, Chris Jordan has tried to actually show us what those numbers look like. I mean, 60,000 plastic bags every 5 seconds, sheesh.

A monumental task pulled off quite well. Worth the 30 seconds of computer energy to see (you could, of course, install BOINC for some of those unused computer cycles, but that is another story for another blog entry on another day)....

photo downloaded from Chris Jordan's site, http://www.chrisjordan.com/