Well, we made it. According to UN estimates, the world now holds 7 billion human beings. 7 billion people. And what a journey it’s been. From less than a 15,000 individuals on Earth 70,000 years ago after the Toga supereruption, to 1 billion people in 1806, all the way to today. I just want to take this post to give you an idea of the amount of people we’re talking about here.
In all of human history, there has been around 106 billion people ever born. That means that of all the humans ever alive, 6.7% of them are alive right now. 4 people are born and 2 people die every second. If we took every single human on the face of the Earth and stacked them one on top of another, they’d stretch from the Earth to the moon and back to the Earth 15 times. If I decided to write out 7 billion letters without any spaces in between, I’d have to use a little over 2 million pages of paper. Indeed, what a fantastic journey it’s been.
And yet, there’s still so much of it left. Around 1 billion people worldwide go to bed with a hungry stomach. Almost 3 billion people live on under $2 dollars a day (an even more astounding figure is that to be in the top 1% of the world, in regards to income, you have to earn a measly $34,000 a year). Around 1.5 billion people are illiterate. And sadly, these numbers are only expected to rise. So while we celebrate the triumph of humanity on reaching 7 billion living, let us remember those whose lives are barely livable.
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“The revolution will not be televised. It will, however, be livestreamed.” — Anthony de Rosa
This weekend happened to compose of one more extra day than usual, for we had that archaic “holiday” of Columbus Day off. So, what did I decide to do for those three days of school-less bliss? Attempt to calculate the average distribution of letters in the English language of course! To begin the study, I started off by measuring the amount of letters in this paragraph (you don’t have to actually read this part, just be aware that it’s there):
Language is a particularly curious thing. Why do we write as we do? How did language come to be the way it is? Why are some letters used more than others? It spurns on many questions, most of which I can’t answer. One of them I will attempt, however: what is the distribution of letters in English? So, let’s try and see if we can find out. I will count all the letters present on this page, find their percentages, and graph them. Time for math!
So, with all the letters counted, I created this graph. The x axis is for each letter, and the y axis represents the amount. From a quick glance at the graph, it appears that the top three most used letters, at least in the above paragraph, are “e”, “t,” and “i.” While this is great to know for a paragraph of 347 words, it doesn’t really help much with my overall goal. If I really want to find the average distribution, I’ll have to go much bigger, and by bigger I mean using multiple books.
Of course, there are certain practical problems with using texts of over 500 letters; mainly, the fact that I would have to count each individual letter one by one. Books have at least 50,000 words, let alone letters! To rectify this issue, I decided to write up a simply Java program to count the letters for me. If for some strange reason you want to view the code I used to accomplish this, I humbly direct you to this link.
Now that my letter counting problem was solved, it was time to select the texts I would be using for the program itself. I settled on eight books, two of which would be of my own authorship. Why? Well because I’m selfish and narcissistic, that’s why. The first two books, I decided, would be Blood on the Golden Horn and The Heist, both written by myself. The next would be The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by the infinitely hilarious Douglas Adams. H2G2, as it’s been abbreviated, is one of my favorite books of all time, and greatly represents modern speech and diction. Next up came The Fellowship of the Ring, the first novel in J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic Lord of the Rings series. I thought this book was an appropriate choice, considering it created the fantasy genre. Follow that was Ulysses by James Joyce. Considered by many the best book ever written in the English language, it was all too perfect for a study like this. To try and spice things up a bit and get a better range of data, I decided that the last books would all be something other than just pure fiction. For my scientific book, I chose On the Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin, a landmark book. Paradise Lost, the epic poem by John Milton, came next. And what better to top off a study on the English language than a play by the man who essentially made the language what it is today? My last text was Hamlet by William Shakespeare.
With my books chosen, I plugged them into my Java program and recorded the results of each. Then, I graphed each and every book. You can view all eight graphs here. (The image is too big to post here). With all the books totals counted, I added them all together to get a grand total across all eight works. With this grand total, I then found out the percentage each letter took of the total letters (which happened to be 3,910,041). With that, I created the final graph.
As you can see, this graph looks eerily similar to the first graph. It seems that at even such a small amount of letters as 347, the distribution holds true from that all the way up to almost 4 million different letters. To my surprise, the letters used most are not the five vowels. The top five letters used are “e,” “t,” “a,” “o,” and “i.” “U” is missing from the top, replaced by “t.” But even if “t” was eliminated, “u” would still be nowhere near the top. What a curious little language we have. I hope that this little experiment of sorts has given you a bit more knowledge about the language that we all use each and every day!
NOTE: If you want to see the full data table of the number of letters in each book, all the charts, and the like, you can download my report here (in .xls).
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I never had the pleasure of seeing Steve Jobs give a keynote. I never knew him personally. But Steve Jobs touched me in a way I can’t fully describe in words. He was a visionary. He was a genius in every sense of the word. He founded the most influential tech company in the world, was fired by that same company, took it back over six months from bankruptcy, and turned it into the most valuable company on the face of the Earth. He showed that liberal values were compatible with big business. You can disagree with his views on control and curation. You can hate his closed app ecosystem and his secrecy over products. But the one thing you can’t do is ignore the fact that he changed the world for the better. Steve moved the human race forward, in a way only he could. Thanks to him, touch screens are the norm. Thanks to him, music is just seconds away. Thanks to him, we get to use some of the most beautiful products around. The history books will speak of Steve’s influence on the development of humanity in much the same way they do of Edison, of von Braun, and Tesla. But most of all, Steve taught me to never settle. Always look for the best. Love what you do, and the rest will follow. And for that, I thank you. Steve, you will be truly missed.
In celebration of International Blasphemy Day, here is a painting of the Prophet Muhammed with the angel Jibril. It is absolutely ridiculous that were I located in quite a few countries around the globe, this act would cause me to be sentenced to death. That’s made even funnier by the fact that no where in the Qu’ran does it say the Muhammed may not be depicted; it was created by Islamic scholars who feared the worship of Muhammed over Allah. With that little piece of history, happy International Blasphemy Day everybody!
Isn’t racism fun?
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It’s happened again. For just the third time in our history, humanity has found an exoplanet that exists in the habitable zone of its star. The previous two, Gliese 581g and Gliese 581d, I have covered previously. I calculated the surface gravity of Gliese 581g here. For both Gliese 581d and Gliese 581g I calculated the size its star would look in the sky. You can view those posts here and here, respectively. But enough about these old planets; time to talk about the newest one discovered just yesterday! Named by most as HD 85512 b, it orbits (predictably) the star HD 85512 b right in the habitable zone where liquid water could theoretically exist. I like to call this planet Gliese 370 b, however, for it’s easier to remember and still technically correct. (HD 85512 and Gliese 370 are the same star, just under different classification systems) And of course, if this planet has water, I’d like to imagine that humans will eventually get there. Once we arrive on Gliese 370 b, what will the gravity be like? Will it crush us, or will it be too light? Time to find out! (NOTE: This is a post only about the surface gravity of Gliese 370 b. If you want a post about how its star will look in its sky, stay tuned; that post will come in a few days.)
To do this calculation, I will be using Newton’s Universal Law of Gravitation, as it applies to the surface gravity of planets. The equation is:
g=G(m/r^2) where:
Here is where we run into a problem, however. We measured and know the mass of Gliese 370 b (3.6 Earth masses), but don’t know the radius. There are ways of finding it, however. To do so, I’m going to use the equation for the volume of a sphere, which states:
V=4/3*r^3*π
Of course, we don’t know the volume of Gliese 370b. There is another equation for volume to help us figure it out, however. It says:
V=m/d where:
This is starting to get a bit repetitive, but we don’t know the density of Gliese 370 b, either. However, we can take a reasonable guess. In relation to the size of the star, Gliese 370 b is about the same distance away as Venus is from our own star. If Gliese 370 b is capable of supporting life as we know it (which, for the purpose of this exercise, we assume is), it has to be a terrestrial planet like Venus, Earth, and Mars. As I’ve already stated, it’s in the same position as Venus so it is more than likely a rocky, terrestrial planet. Terrestrial planets have mostly the same composition, so we can assume that Gliese 370 b’s density is virtually the same as Venus’. Therefore, the density of Gliese 370b is 5.24 grams/cubic centimetre. We know the mass of Gliese 370 b is 3.6 Earth masses, or 2.149991496*10^25 kilograms. Therefore, its volume is 4.103*10^27 cubic centimetres. Working backwards in the previous volume equation, we can find the radius, which turns out to be 9.931258873*10^6 metres.
Now that we have the radius, we can plug it into the original surface gravity equation and finally solve it. With all the values plugged in, we get:
g=G(2.149991496*10^25 kilograms/(9.931258873*10^6 metres)^2)
The result comes out to be 14.55 metres/seconds squared. In comparison, it’s 9.81 m/s^2 and on Gliese 581g it’s (probably) 17.98 m/s^2. Therefore, it’s heavier than Earth but lighter than Gliese 581g. The surface gravity of Gliese 370 b is around 1.5 times heavier than it is here on Earth. Whilst that change in gravity is noticeable, it’s nowhere near enough to kill us; in fact, our bodies would naturally adapt to the heavier G environment within months. It is very possible for humans to settle Gliese 370 b, at least as far as gravity is concerned. Now, the only challenge is figuring out how to get there!
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On this day 10 years ago, terrorists from the Muslim extremist group al Qaeda launched a coordinated and planned strike on America soil, killing 2,996 civilians. This is a story virtually everybody on the face of the Earth is familiar with. Today, there will be a myriad of posts commemorating its anniversary, so I thought that me throwing another one into the mix would contribute virtually nothing. There is another, however, that most do not know about. This 9/11 took place in the South American country of Chile, and ironically saw the United States act as the terrorists, so to speak.
The year was 1973. The world was embroiled in an ideological battle between capitalism and communism. Chile had chosen her side in 1970, when the country democratically elected Salvador Allende of the Marxist party. Needless to say, the United States did not take so kindly the idea that a country would legally and democratically elect a communist leader. For three years Allende ruled Chile with the support of the Chilean people, increasing the size of healthcare, education, and welfare for the lower classes. He increased employment of people like miners and nationalized institutions such as banks. All the while, the United States was using the CIA to cause political and economic imbalance in the country. The fact that Allende was communist superseded the fact that he was elected by his people; the US cared more about stopping communism than helping democracy.
In 1973, the CIA’s moment of opportunity came. Discontent with Allende’s treatment of them, the military was showing signs of opposition. The CIA seized upon this and helped foster a military coup d’état. On September 11, the coup began. Allende, surrounded in his Presidential palace on all sides with nobody to turn to, decided to kill himself rather than surrender. After the coup, Augusto Pinochet set up a military junta to take control of the country. He later became the sole dictator of the country, all with the United States’ blessing. Upon taking control of the country, Pinochet immediately set out to oppress all opposition, disbanding and killing many leftist parties and declaring all other parties in “recess.” In all, Pinochet was estimated to have killed over 2,000 Chileans, exiled over 1,000, and tortured over 30,000 citizens, including women and children. All of this because the United State could not accept a democratically elected Marxist.
So as we commemorate the loss of life that happened on 9/11 in the United States, do not forget what the United States did in Chile on the same day. Do not forget that the United States, the so called “land of the free,” choose fascism and capitalism over democracy and communism. Do not forget that Chile suffered for 17 years because of the actions of the CIA. Do not forget the other 9/11.
“Listening to GOP Presidential candidates talk about science is like listening to children talk about sex: They know it exists, they have strong opinions about what it might mean, but they don’t have a clue what it’s actually about.” — Spencer Windes
