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What statistic is absolutely mind-blowing?
Contrary to popular belief, if you're in a position where you need CPR from cardiac arrest, you only have a 5-10% chance of surviving after an attempted resuscitation.
Contrary to popular belief, if you're in a position where you need CPR from cardiac arrest, you only have a 5-10% chance of surviving after an attempted resuscitation.
That 41% of American adults aren't able to cover an unexpected $400 expense without needing to borrow money, sell something, etc.
It's kind of terrifying to me to think that almost half (and it was half in 2013) of Americans are living that close to the edge financially. The page I linked has a few other similar statistics as well that are also pretty scary (like 27% of people choosing to skip medical care because they couldn't afford it).
Similar numbers for Canadians! For "44% of working Canadians report it would be difficult to meet their financial obligations if their pay cheque was delayed by even a single week (down from the three-year average of 48%)."
46% of the world's guns are in civilian American hands. The American civilian population is more armed than their military (not necessarily better-armed). There are 120 guns for every 100 people in America (the next closest is Yemen, with 53 guns per 100 people). Considering how incompetent people tend to be, even when trained, I have a few concerns with that.
And if that surprises you, then the fact, from the same survey, that 85% of the world's arms are in civilian hands might stand out as well. And no, law enforcement is not included in that percentage.
An interesting related number is that just 3% of Americans own half the nation's guns -- although I note that the figure comes from a compensated opt-in study. Still, even judging from legislation alone one could say pretty safely that the average American gun owner is more likely to have an arsenal than the average Swiss or Australian gun owner.
Some of us might prefer the word 'collection' over 'arsenal'.
Does "arsenal" have a negative connotation? As far as I am aware that's the given term for a collection of weapons. I didn't mean to imply any positive or negative judgment.
I speak for only myself here, but the imagery the word conjures up isn't something I enjoy.
I feel a bit of an odd duck when it comes to firearm ownership, and how I associate with the world. A stereotype for a person who owns a significant amount of firearms, qualifying for the word arsenal, might be something like a prepper, a gun nut, right-wing individual, or bubba-redneck type.
I'm definitely applying my personal bias here, make no mistake. But a conversation that tends to come up in the circles I run in (hippie, far-left, LGBT, etc) is invariably something along the lines of: why do you need so many, or what, are you preparing for something? Fair questions, sure, but I feel like a bit isolated once that happens; I'm not always treated the same afterwards. Gun ownership is not often welcomed with open arms among those I associate with, and I often feel a need to defend myself about it—especially since several of the firearms I own are controlled items or AR-pattern rifles. Not exactly the kind of stuff that even the more pro-2A hippie, far-left folk necessarily love.
Personally I would prefer some distance between myself and the word arsenal. Even if the word is technically correct, I feel that the word collection better reflects how I see myself as a firearm owner and my collection itself.
I see where you're coming from! I'm more interested in naval guns, where "arsenal" is by definition the term for a quantity of them, so I've actually thought of it as the least politicized term, ironically :)
I've actually gotten a little guff from friends who prefer to avoid the term "collection" since they feel it gives the impression of wood-furnitured bolt-action rifles only, or is distastefully upper-class.
I will stick to referring to a group of guns as a "flock" or "herd", haha.
Ha, I guess this is one of those things. It's just a difference.
I've alway considered an arsenal when someone or group has a collection of the same or similar firearms, to be distributed in the case of conflict. For me a collection is someone or group that has multiple firearms that either have historical or sentimental meaning, or are varied in their design and use.
Your God Damn Right
'Murica
/s
Yeah, but the military is all working together and can mobilize all their guns to wherever they need. The same can't be said for the American people.
I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.
Here's the source! This is assuming a conventional CPR by a bystander and not in a medical professional setting (e.g. cardiac arrest in the middle of a public square). You can see the rates for the other contextual situations in that article as well.
You're welcome! You're also right about these claims thrown around with no citation, and with our current internet trend of misleading claims and false facts it's important to back it with a reasonable source.
Here's a visual graph that makes it easier to follow and understand the study.
Not really a statistic, but I've always found Graham's number to be pretty mind blowing. A number so large that the observable universe is far too small to contain an ordinary digital representation of it. If you were capable of memorizing every digit, your brain would literally collapse into a black hole before you were done.
The thing I love about Graham's Number is that you can't even really say how big it is using English. Like you said "the observable universe is far too small to contain an ordinary digital representation of it", which is not even close to describing how big Graham's Number is. That's not an attack on you: that's just how hard it is to describe how big the number is. Let's say "x" is the smallest number that cannot be represented using ordinary representations in the observable universe. How much bigger is Graham's Number than "x"? I can't say "it's a billion times bigger", or "it's 9e999999999999999 times bigger than that". I don't really have any English words or grammar at my disposal to begin talking about how much bigger Graham's Number is than "x".
There's only one way to start describing how big Graham's Number is, and that's math. You have no choice but to just plug through the mathematical definitions.
For those who aren't math people and want to start appreciating how difficult it is to describe how big Graham's Number is, consider this:
Let's say 1000 is a big number. If we add more zeroes, we obviously get a bigger number. 10000 (4 zeroes) is bigger. 100000 (5 zeroes) is even bigger, etc.
Now let's consider 10000...00000 (1000 zeroes). That's a really big number! It's so big I don't even know if Tildes will allow me to put the whole thing in this comment.
Let's say "a" is 1000. "b" is 1000...00000 (1000 zeroes).
From here, let's try to make a pattern. "c" is 1000...0000 ("b" zeroes). I.e., "b" has 1000 zeroes. "c" has so many zeroes that it would take a number with 1000 zeroes just to describe how many zeroes it has. Now let's define "d". "d" is 1000...0000 ("c" zeroes). I.e., "d" has so many zeroes, that if you wanted to say how many zeroes it had, you'd need a number so big, that that number would need 1000 zeroes just to say how many zeroes it had.
By the time you get to "d" or "e" (I can't remember precisely), you're already at a number so big that it cannot be written as a regular number, even if you used every single subatomic particle in the observable universe as a digit to write with.
But of course, you can keep going higher, on to "f" and "g" and "h" and so on. I don't know about you, but my brain can't even really keep track of what we're doing with the numbers any more at this point. I can write down the operations of what I'm doing, but my brain just comprehends it nonsensical gibberish.
Of course we're still not even close to constructing Graham's Number, but now we've reached a point where my own abilities in English start to fail. The rest of the construction here isn't just about continuing that pattern, but abstracting that pattern into an operator which can then be put into its own pattern.
Graham's Number isn't about "x times bigger than this other huge number" or "some big number to the power of some other big number", but it's more like "x levels of meta-abstraction more crazy than this sequence of operations", which is a hard thing to express in English.
If I recall correctly, the formal definition is as follows:
Let
a↑{n}bbea↑↑↑...↑↑↑bwhere the total number of up-arrows isn.Now let's recursively define number series
G, so thatG_n = 3↑{G_(n-1)}3andG_0 = 3.Graham's number would then be defined as
G_64.So all in all, it is not hard to imagine even crazier numbers, just do
G_(G_64), but that does not mean Graham's number in itself it's any less crazy. Even the numberG_1(which has 3 up-arrows, mind you) is extremely large. Now forG_2we do not double the amount of up arrows. We do not even square it nor do any other 'sensible' operation. We change the amount of arrows toG_1.If we have number
a = x↑{n}yandb = x↑{n+1}y,bis essentiallyx↑{n}a. But we aren't adding 1 or 2 up-arrows, we are changing 3 of them intoG_1of them.Hold my abacus, there's a even worse than Graham's Number:
In this rather old essay (by Internet age), Scott Aaronson describe various big number and finishes by describing the Busy Beaver. To my level understanding of maths, it is described as "the sequence of the biggest number that can be described with N number of rules" (the more formal definition uses halting Turing machine that halt) .
The busy beaver numbers are really interesting because they let us "cheat" at solving mathematical conjectures. For example, Goldbach's conjecture:
Assume we have a program on a N state turing machine that halts if it finds a counterexample, then we only need to run the program for the Nth busy beaver number of steps because we know that if it runs for longer than that it will never halt! You could do some really crazy stuff, like say, proving ZFC is consistent (something which is impossible within the theory by Gödel!).
Unfortunately none of these things can actually be done practically, the values just grow way too quickly and it's very very hard to get the exact values in the first place (the busy beaver function is uncomputable).
I'm straight up going to steal your last paragraph for my own usage and I'm sorry but I won't quote a username.
More a “fun fact” than a stat, but I really like this page describing exactly how large 52! (factorial) is. 52! is the number of different ways you can arrange a deck of playing cards.
Statistically speaking, that means that any time a deck is given a really good shuffle it’s being placed in an order that no other pack of playing cards has ever been in before.
Not really a statistic, but I have an old write-up from a reddit comment of mine regarding the game-tree complexity of chess:
I also have this neat little tidbit expanding on the subject:
That comment is a bit dated as there are now larger SSDs available and likely half as thick, but even if we take the 60TB drive capacity into consideration and a reduced thickness, the scale is only off by a factor of 10 or so (a rough estimate), so it's still pretty accurate assuming my math wasn't off to begin with.
It was a fun little thought experiment to work through!
Jeff Bezos makes the same amount of money in ten seconds as the median Amazon employee makes in a year.
That was for a specific few months when amazon stock was growing rapidly. Extrapolated to what he would earn through out the year at that unprecedented rate. Also it's not money he got in a paycheck, just his stock appreciating in value.