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In Norton Juster’s novel The Phantom Tollbooth, young Milo explores the worlds of Dictionopolis – full of language puns, and Digitopolis – a land full of number puns. After meeting a Spelling Bee, and trying to climb the stairs to the Land of Infinity, Milo is being pursued by demons. Climbing up to the Castle in the Air Milo faces a problem: a minor bureaucrat. The so-called Senses Taker needs some information before Milo can gain passage:
1) When you were born
2) Where you were born
3) Why you were born
4) How old you are now
5) How old you were then
6) How old you’ll be in a little while
7) Your mother’s name
8) Your father’s name
9) Your aunt’s name
10) Your uncle’s name
11) Your cousin’s name
12) Where you live
13) How long you’ve lived there
14) The school’s you’ve attended
15) The schools you haven’t attended
16) Your hobbies
17) Your telephone number
18) Your shoe size
19) Your collar size
20) Your hat size
21) Names and addresses of 6 people who can verify all this information
Later
on, the Senses Taker asks a few more questions:
22) Height
23) Weight
24) Number of books you read each year
25) Number of books you don’t read each year
26) The amount of time you spend eating, playing, working and sleeping each day
27) Where you go on vacations
28) How many ice cream cones you eat in a week
29) How far it is from your house to the barber shop
30) And which is your favorite color
22) Height
23) Weight
24) Number of books you read each year
25) Number of books you don’t read each year
26) The amount of time you spend eating, playing, working and sleeping each day
27) Where you go on vacations
28) How many ice cream cones you eat in a week
29) How far it is from your house to the barber shop
30) And which is your favorite color
Taking
the list of 30 questions the Senses Taker asks, 27 can be answered easily. Here
are my answers to those:
1) When you were born: 1,991 after 2,019 years ago at the time of writing
2) Where you were born: Englewood, CO, USA, Earth, Sol,
Milky Way, Virgo Cluster, Universe
4) How old you are now: You can do the working out from the
information in question one
5) How old you were then: Assuming this means “at birth,” I
was younger than anyone else on the planet, briefly
6) How old you’ll be in a little while: A little older
7) Your mother’s name: Barb
8) Your father’s name: Jim
9) Your aunt’s name: Marian
10) Your uncle’s name: Brad
11) Your cousin’s name: Tom
12) Where you live: Very near the answer to question 2,
relatively speaking
13) How long you’ve lived there: 0.11 half-lives of
sodium-22
14) The school’s you’ve attended: Pre, Elementary, Middle,
High, Higher, Second-Highest
16) Your hobbies: Long walks on the beach. We’ll be out
there for a while, bring several days rations, water filters, and a tent.
17) Your telephone number: 3.03 billion and change
18) Your shoe size: 3Ï€
19) Your collar size: 15
20) Your hat size: 57, 7.167, 7, or 22.5 depending on who
you ask
21) Names and addresses of 6 people who can verify all this
information: Any 6 people that can verify that I’m a generally honest
person, so you can just go ahead and trust what I said.
22) Height: 182,900,000 beard seconds
23) Weight: 12 stone
24) Number of books you read each year: Averaged since I
started reading: 19
Averaged since
leaving college: 51
Here’s the
data:
26) The amount of time you spend eating, playing, working, and
sleeping each day: 1 hour, 10 minutes, too variable to count, 8 hours, 7
hours and 6 minutes, respectively.
27) Where you go on vacations: Earth, primarily. Sometimes
Tucson.
28) How many ice cream cones you eat in a week: 0.06
29) How far it is from your house to the barber shop:
Nearest barber: 1056 feet
Nearest barber: 1056 feet
My barber: 17 miles
“The Barber Shop,” a barber shop in Denver: 46 miles
30) And which is your favorite color: Blue. Wait,
yelloooooooooooooooo…
That
leaves us with the interesting question the Senses Taker asks Milo and company:
3) Why were you born?
15) The schools you haven’t attended
25) Number of books you don’t read each year
3) Why were you born?
Ask
different fields and get different answers:
Biology: A living
organism was produced by the genetic combination of two gametes
Biochemistry: Hormones
trigger reward pathways in the brain, creating a pleasant sensation we call
“love.” Offspring often result indirectly from this sensation
Evolutionary
Biology:
Selfish genes wish to preserve themselves, and so take steps to make that
happen
Physics: When volume
decreases, pressure increases
Sociology: People in
the context of my parents in terms of social class, status, race, gender,
education, religion, health background, ability, military background, age,
social capital, agency, philosophy, wealth, location and temperament tend to
have kids, in my case near the time of my birth
Philosophy: What do you
do now that you’re born is a far more interesting question
Ecology: Homo
sapiens have a proclivity to grow to carrying capacity. This is a case of this
proclivity.
Hydrology: Why are you
asking me this?
15) The schools you haven’t attended
Questions
like this are un-answerable, but a method I like to estimate these types of
questions goes like this: 1) Invent three ways of estimating this information using
wild guesses. 2) Average the three estimates. This way, the things you estimate
high and the things you estimate low tend to about cancel out.
Method
1:
How many people per school are there on average? Extrapolate.
In 2019, 26% of the world population is under 15.
Let’s assume 75% of these students are in school, and no one over 15 is. That
means we have 1.5 billion students. Let's say each school holds 1,000 students
on average. That means there are 1.5 million schools.
Method
2:
How many schools are in there in a given country? Extrapolate.
Nepal falls just about in the middle of the pack when it comes to
GDP and the World Happiness Report, which itself looks at many different metrics.
Nepal has 36,632 schools,
and a population of 28,600,000.
This means Nepal has 781 people/school. Extrapolating to the entire world we
get 9.8 million schools.
Method
3:
How many schools are in a given developed area? Extrapolate.
Let’s pick 3 cities from countries with varying GDP/capita. We’ll
go with Uganda at $671, Argentina at $14,732, and Singapore at $63,363. The
cities will be Entebbe, Uganda; La Rioja, Argentina; and Jambi, Singapore, for
no reason other than I happened to zoom into them on Google Maps.
Google returns 20 schools in Entebbe, 20 in La Rioja, and about
120 in Jambi. Using their populations to figure out the population/school ratio
we get: 3,135 in Entebbe, 8,943 in La Rioja, and 4,432 in Jambi. These average
to 5,503 people per school. Extrapolating to the planet we get 1.4 million
schools.
Combining
these three methods means there are somewhere in the realm of 4.2 million
schools. Subtracting the 6 I’ve attended means I haven’t attended roughly
4,199,994 schools.
25) The number of books you don’t read each year
The
number of books I haven’t read is 129,864,782 as of August 5, 2010. That
ludicrously specific number comes from a Google software engineers blog post in which he estimated the number of books (129,864,880), minus the 98 books I’d read by 2010.
The
question here is “what counts as a book?” Do political and pornographic
pamphlets widely circulated in the 18th century count? A thesis
published online? Does a compendium of short stories in two volumes and two
editions count as four books, two books, one book, or hundreds? What about the
King James vs New Living English translations of the Bible, or the uncut vs
abridged copies of Stephen King’s The Stand? Leonid Taycher who came up with
the 130 million figure has thought more about this than I have, so let’s use
his number and definition of “books.” There’s no real clearing house for
publishing statistics, so finding out how many books are published per year
seems to involve going through the numerous references on this Wikipedia page and checking their definitions of “books,” seeing if the information is even
there, and if it is, checking its reliability. Rather than doing that, let’s
just take the value it gives us and not think too much about it.
So
Wikipedia gives us 2,210,000 books per year, and we have a starting place of
129.864,782 on August 5th. We can make ourselves an equation! Given
2,210,000 books/year and 364.25 days/year, we know we have 6067.26 books/day
being published. We’ll say I read 51 books/year, or 0.14 books/day. That gives
us 6067.11 books per day I’m not reading. So using good old y=mx+b, we can
start plugging in.
y
= unknown, the number of books I haven’t read
m
= 6067.11, number of new books per day I haven’t read
x
= number of days since August 5, 2010
b
= 129,864,782, number of books unread as of August 5th, 2010
For
today, October 3rd, 2019 the equation looks like this: y = 6067.11 *
3346 + 129,864,782, meaning I have not read 150,165,332.06 books, which
seems right, as I’m nearly done with the Phantom Tollbooth. I’ll knock
out that 0.06 of a book before tomorrow, when 6,000 more books are published.
Cheers,
- Scott
Email list:
Thank you for this. I may use this idea somehow in a kid's program called the PEL I'm putting together. Don't ask what PEL stands for except it is not the PAL
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