Guns, Fraud, and Big Numbers in Canada

[ The following essay won the Letter of the Week award on 2004-02-24 at Mark Steyn's web site, http://www.marksteyn.com . In honour thereof, Mr. Steyn graciously sent me a copy of his "The Face of the Tiger", autographed: "Congratulations. A Great Letter." ]

My Fellow Canadian ~

I once read an excellent Isaac Asimov non-fiction essay on really big numbers. Humans are in general really bad at understanding big numbers. Because of my math / science / engineering background, I'm maybe a bit better than average, but I'm no Asimov. I have though learned a few ways to help me better understand big numbers, so that I can better deal with them when I need to. This essay shows how some of those methods work.

The initial Government of Canada estimate for the gun registry database system was $1 million. Technically, I think that's probably a bit low. Based on my on three decades of work in the field of distributed multi-user database transaction processing systems like the registry, and on some systems I'm currently working on which are of that type, I think $3 million would have been a better estimate.

If someone from the Government of Canada can provide me with a simple accounting showing some component of the system that I've missed, I'd be more than happy to adjust my analysis of the situation to take that data into account. My current analysis is based on the numbers I have collected from the public media over the last few years. The rest is here....

Vitruvius, The Sagacious Iconoclast,

comments regularly on SDA, currently, on "innumeracy":

The following is from the introduction to John Allen Paulos's 1988 book Innumeracy - tinyurl.com/2klh4k

"Innumeracy, an inability to deal comfortably with the fundamental notions of number and chance, plagues far too many otherwise knowledgeable citizens. The same people who cringe when words such as "imply" and "infer" are confused react without a trace of embarrassment even to the most egregious of numerical solecisms.

"I remember once listening to someone at a party drone on about the difference between "continually" and "continuously". Later that evening we were watching the news, and the TV weathercaster announced that there was a 50 percent chance of rain for Saturday, and and 50 percent chance for Sunday, and concluded that there was therefore a 100 percent chance of rain that weekend.

"The remark went right by the self-styled grammarian, and even after I explained the mistake to him, he wasn't nearly as indignant as he would have been had the weathercaster left a dangling participle. In fact, unlike other failings which are hidden, mathematical illiteracy is often flaunted: "I can't even balance my checkbook", "I'm a people person, not a numbers person", or "I always hated math".

/End Excerpts

I think that one of the biggest problems that is posed by innumeracy is the inability of the innumerate to reason with big numbers. For example, some time ago some people were complaining that the oil patch uses 330,000,000 liters of water a year from the Red Deer River. 330,000,000 liters! Ohh, be vewy afwaid!

But wait just a minute, how big is 330,000,000 liters in the Red Deer River context? Well, the river flow rate varies from 10 to 100 cubic meters per second. Assuming only 10 cubic meters per second, that's still 10,000 liters per second. Which means the oil patch uses 33,000 seconds, or about 9 hours, or about 0.1% of the river's annual flow.

Why weren't those people complaining about the oil patch wanting to use 0.1% of the river flow? Why do they say 330,000,000 liters instead? Are they trying to hide a fraudulent agenda behind big numbers?

Ok, now let's consider the case of atmospheric CO2 vapor. Humans produce about 50 giga-tonnes of atmospheric CO2 vapour per year. Be vewy afwaid!
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