Fisher Flour has had scone stands at the Western Washington Fair for decades. They announced last week that they had sold their 100 millionth scone. I sure that at some point over the years someone accidentally put 14 scones into a baker’s dozen bag. Mistakes happen; you couldn’t definitively point to number 100,000,000. But I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and say they were pretty close.
Which got me wondering, what is the most counted object in the world? I’m talking individual objects, so the value of currency printed by the U.S. Mint doesn’t count, but the number of bills of any particular denomination would.
I don’t know that we’d ever find a certain answer for this, but can anyone suggest any possible answers?
Also, distance isn’t countable. I think we’ll have to rule out continuous quantities, but that breaks down at some point. Mass isn’t countable in any everyday sense, but ultimately you can only divide it into a countable number of atoms…
To some degree of certainty, we know how many atoms are in a given mass of material. But that number is derived mathematically. Even if we have the technology to count them as distinct objects, that hasn’t been done as far as I know.
Steps? I may be a little OCD but i count steps almost every time I go up a flight of stairs, even if I climbed them a thousand times before. I don’t normally count them on the way down.
Hmm, that’s an interesting idea. But a “vote” isn’t necessarily the same object from one jurisdiction to another, or may not be a physical object at all. My area used to vote by machine; I assume it just kept some mechanical count and those numbers were added up at the end of the day.
Bullets. Armies like to keep track of those - I bet you could find a count of every round of ammo purchased by the U.S. military in the 20th century, and that’s just one country.