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Numbers carry meaning . . . emotion . . . character . . . soul . . .

Numbers carry meaning . . . emotion . . . character . . . soul . . . . According to a press release from August 11, 2009, the new Chevrolet Volt gets 230 miles per gallon of gasoline.

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Numbers carry meaning . . . emotion . . . character . . . soul . . .

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  1. Numbers carry meaning . . . emotion . . . character . . . soul . . .

  2. According to a press release from August 11, 2009, the new Chevrolet Volt gets 230 miles per gallon of gasoline.

  3. What could this possibly mean? The Volt can be driven for about 40 miles on nothing but electric charge! The whole miles-per-gallon concept had to be redefined just to produce this 230 mpg value.

  4. And . . . why has all the publicity buzz about the Volt said absolutely nothing about the money and environmental costs to produce the electricity that runs it?

  5. Consider this radio ad for Cardiostat. “Today your heart will pump blood 12,000 miles. That’s a trip from L.A. to Moscow and back.” Charles Osgood reads this ad copy.

  6. Let’s see about that. The figure converts to That’s about 733 feet per second.

  7. So what exactly is this all about? Even in a high-power fire hose, water cannot be propelled at 733 feet per second. Can this claim be using the fact that the blood vessels in the human body add up to a lot of linear distance?

  8. That seems illogical, and these hose diagrams show why. The hose in the first picture was split to make the hose in the second picture. The total cross-section has not been changed. If the in-flow in the two pictures is the same, we’d have to say that they move the same amount of liquid per second.

  9. A bit of searching will enable us to discover that blood moves through major vessels at about 15 cm/second. If this is the speed of movement, then there must be some unit of blood B such that the total accounts for 733 miles. That is, This solves as ≈ 7,900,000.

  10. The human body has about five liters of blood. If we divide five liters into 7.9 million parts, the part size is about 0.63 cubic millimeter. This volume could plausibly be described as a “drop.” Thus, if you think of your body has having 7.9 million drops of blood, and if these drops move, on average, about 15 cm per second, then indeed there will be 733 drop-feet per second. Does this make you want to buy CardioStat?

  11. CardioStat is a formulation of omega-3 fish oil. Here is another source of fish oil:

  12. Here are some numbers that might cause you to think . . . Source: Finance: Servant or Deceiver, Paul Dembinski, Figure 2.5, page 96.

  13. There is some looseness in terms of defining derivatives, but for sure the numbers have exploded. The right column (organized markets) has grown by a factor of 11. The left column (over-the-counter markets) has grown by a factor of 29.

  14. Those who created and traded those derivatives certainly made plenty of money with them. But . . . what were the products and infrastructure that they left behind for the rest of us? There will be painful decisions for all of us regarding these issues. . .

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