| INTRODUCTION |
| Numbers are peculiar animals. They can unlock secrets, split atoms, reveal the inner workings of people and machines or draw patterns of outstanding complexity and beauty. In the East, they have mystical significance – they can tell the future and are the key to the secret harmonies of the universe. They can also make us angry, or make us laugh or cry. This book is a collection of some of the most peculiar numbers we could find. If you want to know how many people are injured every year by tea cozies or how many people believe they have been abducted by aliens, you can find it here. If you want to know how many times you could circle the globe with the toilet paper used in Japan, you can find it here too. It isn’t a directory or encyclopaedia or comprehensive list of numbers – in fact sometimes it isn’t very serious at all – but I hope that every one of these strange statistics will make you gasp, or swear, or laugh, or storm the gates of Parliament or Congress. But there is another message in the book, which is more subtle. It is a request to readers that they should not take any of these statistics at face value. So have a look at them, but then take a second, closer look. Do you believe them? How were they worked out? Is it possible to know such things, and who did the calculation? Are they just general numbers about people that are meaningless when it comes to applying them to individuals? |
| Because as well as being beautiful and useful, and as well as sometimes shocking us into action by taking us by surprise, sometimes numbers are not what they seem. We are suffering often from too many statistics, force-fed them every day by politicians and advertisers. We are measured, counted, and recorded every time we buy anything. We are summed up, averaged out and cross-sectioned by academics and officials in surveys and screeds of government statistics that suck us dry of our individuality. We are part of a gigantic experiment that believes that everything can be measured, and that our chaotic world can then be turned into a sweetly humming machine that the men in white coats can run for us. Actually, it is impossible to measure what causes what –that requires good judgment and common sense. And it is impossible to measure what is really important – love, health, humanity, goodness, beauty. So take these numbers with a healthy pinch of salt, though all of them are official – released by respectable research organizations or by governments. Some of them are wake-up calls about the environment. Some of them are a revelation about the world. But some of them need to be watched very carefully too. |
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