I was reading my local newspaper’s article about the soon-to-open public outdoor pool. Included was this tidbit:
:smack: Yeah, sure. 1500 swimming pools to fill up an ocean. Ok then.
The next day, and before I could send the piece to all my friends and giggle, someone did apparently notice how absurd it was. A little note was added up top reading “Editor’s note: This story has been updated.” No acknowledgement of how they had “updated” it: I guess they were too embarrassed. The offending sentence now reads:
That certainly *looks *a lot better–not so obviously risible. But I still had the feeling this was on the small side. So I did the math. First of all, I found that they had made a division error, misplacing a decimal place and therefore underestimating by a factor of ten: 17 quadrillion divided by 200,000 is 85 billion, not 8.5 billion.
But is that 17 quadrillion figure right? It appears to have come from some schmoe on answers.com, with no citations, so I did my own research.
Assuming that NOAA has the correct information, the Atlantic contains 310 million cubic kilometers of water. A cubic kilometer contains 264 billion gallons. So that’s 82 quintillion gallons of water in the Atlantic Ocean, nearly 5,000 times more than the 17 quadrillion figure. So it’s 410 trillion pools to fill up the ocean, about 50,000 times as much as their “corrected” figure. Sigh.
Incidentally, while researching this I came across more innumeracy, this time from someone with far less excuse–a major research university’s science answers site:
It is, but the real number is a thousand times greater: 82 quintillion, or 82 *billion *billion, gallons. Maybe, if I’m charitable, it was a typo rather than a miscalculation: they only needed to change one “m” to a “b” for it to be correct. Still!
But a quintillion is not a billion billions, whether you’re using American or European definitions thereof. It would be a million billion billions, or a billion trillions.
And on the literary side, it’s a completely worthless comparison. It does nothing for the visualization of either the Atlantic Ocean (which has nothing to do with the article in question) or the swimming pool, which one can only assume was the subject.
So not only did they screw up their math, they used bad research, and the whole sentence should have been scrubbed after the first draft.
I’m using American definitions, which I think must be different from the way you understand them (your use of “billions”, along with the late hour, lead me to believe you are from across the “pond”–heh, that’s a funny metaphor given this subject). My understanding, which jibes with Wikipedia’s, is that 10^6 is a million, 10^9 is a billion, 10^12 is a trillion, 10^15 is a quadrillion, and 10^18 is a quintillion. 10^9 times 10^9 is 10^18. Make sense?
It’s true, although maybe to begin with it didn’t seem so bad. You can sort of imagine 1,500 swimming pools (say, a 50X30 grid of them), and after all the idea was originally to say “wow, look how much water is in this pool”. And indeed, if it had 1/1500 the water of the Atlantic Ocean, that would be a hell of a lot of water in the pool. (In fact, that would be a pool with approximately 10 times as much water in it as in all the Great Lakes combined, or twice as much as all the fresh water on Earth.) Which of course doesn’t explain why it seemed reasonable for an imaginable number of swimming pools with an average depth of maybe six feet to have as much water as the Atlantic!
In any event, once they realized they had to correct it, it was *really *screwed up in literary terms, because now it starts out with something along the lines of “wow, 200,000 gallons–that’s a lotta watta” but pivots bizarrely to, essentially: “…although it’s a really miniscule amount compared to the Atlantic Ocean”. (sad trombone) And that’s even though they are currently overstating the fraction by a factor of fifty thousand.
It’s true, although I guess technically the same could be said even for the Mediterranean despite it being almost completely enclosed. (I was just wondering the other day whether sharks and whales and such swim on in there from the open ocean.) I suppose they draw two imaginary lines due south from Cape Horn and Cape of Good Hope and draw the oceans’ boundaries there? Oh, but you mentioned the Southern Ocean too. Hmm…not sure how they would define that. Maybe by the Antarctic Circle? That’s not much of an ocean in that case.
Trillion is a thousand billion or 1,000 * 1,000,000,000 = 1,000,000,000,000.
Quadrillion is a million billion or 1,000,000 * 1,000,000,000 = 1,000,000,000,000,000.
Quintillion is a billion billion or 1,000,000,000 * 1,000,000,000 = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000.
A trillion billion is known as a sextillion. 10^12 * 10^9 = 10^21 = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
I still remember an article in the college newspaper, from way back when, that was trying to blame the “Freshman 15” weight gain on cheese. It contained the factoid “Over the course of a college education, the average student eats the equivalent of one million Kraft Singles”. Now, to be fair, that “fact” was sourced as “I made it up”, but sheesh, can’t people even go to the effort to think “Four years is a a thousand-and-something days, therefore 1 million over four years is close to a thousand per day”?
I know, right? It was so absurd. What I really wonder is if I would have caught their further error if I had not seen the article until it was “corrected”. I hope so, since it was still only 1/50,000th of the correct figure (representing about half* of the amount of water in Lake Superior), but I dunno.
*The proportion, that is; the figure in gallons was ten times greater but still only 1/5,000th the actual amount in the Atlantic.
1500 pools is a grid of pools, 39 pools in each direction. That’s about 1km x 2km, 2m deep. Not much of an ocean; you could walk around it in about 90 minutes, and if you dive in you’ll probably scrape your head on the abyssal plain.
This seems like a good thread to repost a haedline I’ve complained about before.
The Washington Post Express, a free newsrag they distribute to Metro (subway) commuters, is notoriously badly copyedited (probably not at all, is my guess). On the dsy earth’s human population was expected to reach 7 billion, they ran a big front-page headline:
699,999,999 AND ONE!
Uh, folks, fhat would be 700 million. Ten percent of 7 billion.
(In fact, that would be a pool with approximately 10 times as much water in it as in all the Great Lakes combined, or twice as much as all the fresh water on Earth.) Which of course doesn’t explain why it seemed reasonable for an imaginable number of swimming pools with an average depth of maybe six feet to have as much water as the Atlantic!
It was so absurd. What I really wonder is if I would have caught their further error if I had not seen the article until it was “corrected”. I hope so, since it was still only 1/50,000th of the correct figure (representing about half* of the amount of water in Lake Superior), but I dunno.