3 ms·

I wonder what they'd look like if you changed the target to a percentage of global population. Moving target, so it'd be harder to figure out, but say time to 5

• jerf 10y ago
  From 38 years to Angry Birds is 2.6 orders of magnitude. Population has increased by a lot less than that since radio. It's close to 400, so a radio population of one billion would have to be 400+ billion today to scale linearly. You are correct that it would be somewhat less dramatic, but it would still be impressively dramatic. I'm just doing some Fermi estimates here to give a sense of what sort of change we'd get in reaction to your idea in the spirit of fun, not anger, because I enjoy this sort of thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem
  • ashark 10y ago
    As pointed out in the notes the Angry Birds entry is a bit of a non sequitur since that's more like measuring how fast a given new TV show's viewership increased after TVs were already extremely common, and it's not exactly a world-changing technology like most of the other things on the list. It's not comparable to the other things, and was probably included for effect rather than its belonging on the list by shared criteria with the other items. I expect the others would look far less dramatic as a percentage—I'd guess the 12-year cell phone number and the 38-year radio number especially would move far closer together if percentages rather than an absolute count were used. TV/cell phone might well reverse, since they're already so close. The table sets off some serious "lying with numbers" warning bells.