Word: numbering
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Perelman married West's sister Laura in 1929. He began his career drawing and writing for Judge and College Humor; the Depression found him in Hollywood writing gags for the Marx Brothers. He also co-authored a number of plays, including One Touch of Venus with Ogden Nash, and in 1956 shared an Academy Award for his work on the film Around the World in 80 Days...
...trouble is that with everything on earth (and off, too) being quantified, micro and macro, the world is becoming woefully littered with numbers that defy useful comprehension. Biology, for example, estimates that the human brain contains some 1 trillion cells. But can any imagination get a practical hold on such a quantity? It is easy to picture the symbolic numerals: 1,000,000,000,000. Still, who can comprehend that many individual units of anything at one time? The number teases, dazzles the mind and even dizzies it, but that does not add up to understanding. Biology ought to find...
...tend to defeat the ordinary imagination. The world population is supposedly 4.2 billion. The nation's 3.N.P. is running at about $2.39 trillion. Washington debates whether defense spending will increase to as much as $122 billion (see cover story for an idea of the realities underlying the number). In truth, far smaller figures can overtax ordinary people, many of whom, after all, have trouble fathoming the weather service's temperature-humidity index...
...clear at just what magnitude (or diminutude) a number passes beyond the capacity of an ordinary person to grasp -that is, to picture the quantity. Yet obviously a great effort is required even to cope with what is symbolized by a billion. The proof lies in those familiar tormented illustrations that writers cook up in the hope of suggesting the amount of a billion: the 125-mile-high stack of dollar bills that would add up to about a billion, the airplane propeller turning around the clock at 2,400 r.p.m. that would fall short of spinning a billion times...
...could be that the googol's emergence marked the time when mankind's fascination with indigestible numbers slipped beyond the pale. In the same decade that the googol appeared, Sir Arthur Eddington opened his absolutely serious book, The Philosophy of Physical Science, with the sentence: "I believe there are 15,747,724,136,275,002,577,605,653,961,181,555,468,044,717,914,527,116,709,366,231,425,076,185,631,031,296 pro tons in the universe and the same number of electrons...