Approximating.

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retepsnikrep
Posts: 71
Joined: Wed Dec 13, 2006 9:39 am

Approximating.

Post by retepsnikrep »

It is an easily acquired accomplishment to work out very complicated problems, approximately.

For example. What is 999 times one million and one?

Answer. About a thousand million.

What would you like estimating? Grains of sand in the Sahara? Drops of water in the Atlantic? How about; how many words have been spoken by all the people in the world in the last 1000years?

Say there are four billion people in the world now.

Say there were about one billion a thousand years ago.

Average people in the world during the last thousand years, two billion.

How many words does each person speak in a day?

Say two words a second. A Politician or businessman might speak for three hours a day, and halve that for the other person talking and you have the following......2x60x60x3 equals, say 20,000 divided by 2 is 10,000.

So we have ten thousand words a day for a talker. For a lonely Nepalese hill farmer without even an Ox to talk to, he might speak 500 words a day. There are many more peasants than captains of industry so average it out at 1,500 words a day per person.

Multiply 1,500 words a day by the number of people, 2,000,000,000 and multiply that by the number of days in 1000years, say 350,000.

Seems a bit complicated still does it? Alright do ‘rounding up and down’

Say 1,000,000,000 people at 2,000 words per day, answer two thousand billion words, easy. Multiply that by the days, 350,000 rounded up to 500,000 because we rounded down the population pretty severely.

Now 500,000 times two thousand billion. Easy again, halve the two to one and add six noughts......1,000,000,000,000,000

One million billion words have been uttered in the last thousand years. Approximately.

You don’t agree? Didn’t take your wife/husband/partner into account? Alright you work it out your way.

Happy New Year

Peter :)

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Bill Sikes
Posts: 5515
Joined: Fri Aug 20, 2004 2:21 am

Approximating.

Post by Bill Sikes »

retepsnikrep;502998 wrote: Happy New Year

Peter :)




Thank you, I enjoyed that enormously. Happy New Year to you, too.
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Marie5656
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Joined: Tue May 09, 2006 10:10 am

Approximating.

Post by Marie5656 »

Interesting. That is alot of stuff.
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Galbally
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Joined: Tue Oct 25, 2005 5:26 pm

Approximating.

Post by Galbally »

Estimated number of particles in the universe?, one by ten to the power of 48, or a one with 48 zeros after it. Its a massive number, but then its not even a googolplex when you think about it!
"We are never so happy, never so unhappy, as we imagine"



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"A smack in the face settles all arguments, then you can move on kid."



My dad 1986.
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