"How Many is Blue?" is a variant of the question I put at the end of every test I gave in Poland when I taught high school English in 1991. It ensured no one got 100% and also made sure that they worked on the test for the full length of the class.
"How many is 600,000?" is about as useful a question. I have been yapping here and there about the relative merits of bloggards and bloggetry, comparing it to CB radio and ham radio implicitly dismissively, obstensably. I even noted that the objective observer could easily confuse the PWPer with the ham as both are really the small domaine - or even domain - of the nerd, Gates's hobbyists. That all being said, it was interesting to note that there are more ham radio licenses in the USA than the estimated global blog statistics of 600,000. This is only to propose that claims to a "tipping point" must at least ask the same of hammetry. Compare and contrast.
Later: I failed to link to Dave3's original post which itself is link slap-happy.
Comments
Alan - November 3, 2003 8:25 AM
And, via Dave3, how many are deadwood?
Shelley - November 3, 2003 9:34 AM
But really, how many IS 600,000? Doesn't it seem to you that numbers are losing their meaning, the higher they climb? Lottery jackpots of 25 million, deficits of 5 billion - we toss these numbers around as though we could, in fact, imagine them. And most of us can't. My frame of reference ends at about 300,000 - that's how many people in the metro region in these parts. I have some concept of how crowded the mall is going to be. Beyond that - unfathomable.
Alan - November 3, 2003 10:00 AM
And as there is no central repository of finding information gleaned from the 600G, scale increases impotence as the information is farther and farther away from us. For Google to be effective for you, you already have to know what you are looking for and how it is defined. During the auroras last week I was trying to find the layer of the sky in which it all was happening - troposphere, etc. It was useless as I did not know the taxonomy and Google does not assist in organization of data. It is like the guy who dumps a years worth of receipts and tells his accountant to do his taxes then wonders why it takes so long and is so expensive.
Humblebub - November 3, 2003 10:14 AM
I don't undertand the confusion regarding the question of 'how many is blue.' The answer is, of course, 6
Alan - November 3, 2003 10:17 AM
That is because you are a beautiful man.
Arthur - November 3, 2003 8:16 PM
'how many is blue.'
As a programmer, I find this a fascinating question. I could explain the colour Blue using RGB, in decimal, binary and hexadecimal system. Then I would refine the question into 'What is blue' and 'Why is blue, blue'. And then I would try to explain the RGB system and.... and... But then it would sink into me that *that* was not the question at all.