I was reading over at Bad Astronomy, one of my favourite blogs, and read a recent thread about the largeness of some things, and how people perceive them. His thread specifically was talking about one billion. His example was computers, and a gigabyte is 1000X a megabyte. But knowing that doesn't mean we grasp the immenseness of a billion, or in universal terms how small a billion really is.
In my daily routines at work, I'm measuring things as small as parts per million, so that's pretty tiny.
This image on this page shows how large a million is. You have to click through to full resolution before you see all of those tiny dots...a million of them:
http://jayepperhart.com/milliondot.gif
The fish I'm charged with keeping healthy at work extract oxygen from water to breathe, which is really the opposite of the perspective Phil talks about over at Bad Astronomy. At 10°C, fresh water will hold about 11.2 milligrams of oxygen per litre, at saturation. That's the same thing as saying 11.2 parts per million. Lets call that twelve of those dots, and the rest is everything else.
Compare that to the atmosphere we breathe, which is 21% oxygen (close enough). Efficiency in the fish gills, and other associated physiological adaptations allows them to survive in an environment that to us, is practically devoid of oxygen. We waste most of the oxygen we move through our lungs, which is nearly 20,000 times the abundance compared to a fish.
And that's really not even that small of a quantity compared to chemicals which are toxic at infinitesimally small amounts. Bisphenol A is found in most Americans now as an example. Between 0.1 and 9 parts per billion, which is above the concentration which produces adverse effects in lab conditions...
Really small. If one of those dots you can see was made up of a thousand more dots, just 9 of them being Bisphenol A would be enough to cause adverse effects...
In my daily routines at work, I'm measuring things as small as parts per million, so that's pretty tiny.
This image on this page shows how large a million is. You have to click through to full resolution before you see all of those tiny dots...a million of them:
http://jayepperhart.com/milliondot.gif
The fish I'm charged with keeping healthy at work extract oxygen from water to breathe, which is really the opposite of the perspective Phil talks about over at Bad Astronomy. At 10°C, fresh water will hold about 11.2 milligrams of oxygen per litre, at saturation. That's the same thing as saying 11.2 parts per million. Lets call that twelve of those dots, and the rest is everything else.
Compare that to the atmosphere we breathe, which is 21% oxygen (close enough). Efficiency in the fish gills, and other associated physiological adaptations allows them to survive in an environment that to us, is practically devoid of oxygen. We waste most of the oxygen we move through our lungs, which is nearly 20,000 times the abundance compared to a fish.
And that's really not even that small of a quantity compared to chemicals which are toxic at infinitesimally small amounts. Bisphenol A is found in most Americans now as an example. Between 0.1 and 9 parts per billion, which is above the concentration which produces adverse effects in lab conditions...
Really small. If one of those dots you can see was made up of a thousand more dots, just 9 of them being Bisphenol A would be enough to cause adverse effects...