I read it on the internet
The other day I happened upon a list of 30 random facts that was posted at PurpleSlinky.com and found a couple of these “facts” a little hard to believe.
I’m not going to reprint the whole list here. You can click the link above for the list.
“Fact” number one on their list says,
In a lifetime, an average person walks the equivalent of 5 equators
Okay, let’s examine this in detail. First, we need a few definitions.
We need to define how long “the average lifespan” is. I found a page at www.efmoody.com which lists the average life expectancy for males and females born in 1996 in 36 different countries. That sounds like a reasonable sampling, so I added the numbers for male life expectancy in those countries, then divided by 36 to get an average human male life expectancy of 67.0278 years. The same procedure for the women gave an average female life expectancy of 72.583 years. I averaged those two numbers to come up with an average human life expectancy of 69.8056 years.
Next we need to define the distance around the Earth’s equator. The Physics Factbook estimates the diameter of the Earth at its equator to be 12,756 km or 7926.2109282 miles.
Now, FIVE times around the equator is just over 39,631 miles.
In order to walk 39,631 miles in 69.8 years, one must cover just under 568 miles per year. That works out to a shade over 1.5 miles each and every day of the average lifetime (and I did not allow for the first 12 to 18 months when most humans aren’t even able to walk).
Do you walk 1.5 miles per day? Do you know anyone who does? Do you realize how much work it is taking for other people to pick up your slack? Or, do you think somebody might have pulled that “statistic” out of their butt?
The other “Fact” listed at PurpleSlinky.com I wish to take issue with is this one:
14 The average person makes over 1000 phone calls a day
Get serious!
One Thousand phone calls per day is about 41.67 calls per hour.
That’s about .69 calls per minute, or 1.43 minutes per call. Converting the decimal portion of a minute into seconds, that’s about 1 minute 25 seconds from the start of one call to the start of the next.
The only way you could make 1000 calls per day is if you started a new call every minute and a half or less for 24 hours and never took time to watch tv, sleep, eat, do what most of us do at least once every 24 hours as a result of eating, or read stupid crap on the internet.
I really wish people would do a little simple math before proclaiming some ridiculous fact is true.
