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> 10 billion words, times an average word length of 11.66, gets us ~4.8 billion individual characters spoken per person per lifetime. Am I missing something or
by lilyball 7y ago
> 10 billion words, times an average word length of 11.66, gets us ~4.8 billion individual characters spoken per person per lifetime.
Am I missing something or is this math very wrong?
- ringshall 7y agoAlso, “ roughly 10 billion words said, per person (16,000 per day * 26,280 days = ~420,480,000)“ Not sure if I completely missed something but it looks like 420m words per person. Edit: combine these two errors and it makes sense. The 10b number is in the text but not the arithmetic. 16000 words per day * 26000 days * 11 chars per word = 4.5E9 chars per person.
- isomorphic 7y agoI noticed this, too. If you take 16,000 words/day multiplied by 26,280 days (72 years' worth of days), you get the 420.48 million in the text. If you take that number and multiply by 24, you get 10,091,520,000--close enough to 10 billion that I think the author made a days versus hours mistake somewhere. The remainder of the article seems to actually use the 420.48 million number and not 10 billion, as ringshall points out.
- jonluca 7y agoThat's my bad, accidentally left in some earlier wording. All the numbers are correct except for references to 10 billion - those should all be 420 million. It should be updated in the text soon.