Did you know?

This YouTube video is making the rounds (or already has, and I'm late again)

• Did you know?

I saw this video a few weeks ago (saw it at a blog), and while it's interesting, it still generates, a 'but what about ...?' response in me.

• China being the #1 English-speaking country in the world ...

Would that be business English or native English?

• 25% of India's highest-IQ people outnumber all Americans

http://www.infoplease.com/countries.html  

India total population: 1,147,995,898

U.S. total population: 301,139,947

Then about 25% of India's population must be high-IQ. (and I don't even know where to look for that breakdown [!] )

• "currently preparing" kids for jobs that don't exist ... using technologies that haven't been invented ... in order to solve problems that we don't know are problems.

Yeah. As if I, a 1968-high school graduate, was trained in any kind of software manipulation, or even minimal coding. Uh, huh.

• "today's learner" will have 10-14 jobs by the age of 38

I think my 39-year old son has already done that.

• 1 in 4 workers has been with the current employer less than a year

Is this at McDonald's, Burger King, the perfume counter in a department store, or is this in the Army, with Ford or IBM?

• 1 in 8 couples who married last year met online

As compared to couples in the past who saw a personals ad in the paper ... or consulted Yente?

• 200 million MySpace users

... to include me, who never did anything with the page, and hasn't looked at it more than 2 or 3 times.   So, does that 200 million figure include all the 'dead' people like me?

• #1 country with Broadband penetration is Bermuda...

... which has a very limited population (2008: 66,536) because the islands only comprise about 21-square miles (21 miles long x 1 mile wide at the widest point -- I used to live there), coupled with a massive offshore banking presence.  Unfortunately (for the quotation), the Netherlands is listed (at this site) as #1.

• 31 billion Google searches/month ... that no one knows to whom these questions were addressed "B.G."

Hmmm, let's see.
-- What movie (newspaper, call up theater)
-- Where to eat? (rack your brain)
-- Menu of where we'll eat (wait 'til we get there)
-- (got tired of thinking what people search for, so I searched for what people search for) ... Google Hot Trends

• number of text messages sent per day exceeds the population of the planet
• Decreasing number of years to reach a market audience
• Number of internet devices in 1984 was 1,000
• Number of internet devices in 2008 is 1,000,000,000
• 5x as many words in the English language as in Shakespeare's time.
• more information in 1 week's worth of the NY Times than an 18th century person ever knew.
• 4 exabytes of "unique information" this year
• technical information doubling ever 2 years
• kids will be learning obsolete information
• a fiber optic cable that can handle 14 trillion bits per second
• So, what does it all mean?

It means that things are going along as they always have done.

New technologies just about always inflict obsolescence on older technologies -- maybe with the exception of Betamax.  I guess Sony learned from that one.

Strings of events packaged together do look impressive, but closeness doesn't always equal relevance.  Two interesting books that give perspective to this accumulation of facts are:

How to Lie With Statistics

The Skeptical Environmentalist  (page 336, Weighing risks)