May 29 Numbers

I love those lists of numbers and the FT Mag does a lovely little 'Week in Numbers' that enlivened my morning coffee:

In the past seven days, about 2.6m babies have been born around the world.

Roughly twice as many computers have been sold in the same period and at least four times as many mobile phones.

For every baby born, the world churned out nearly 40 tonnes of food

Births outnumber deaths by just over two to one.

Worldwide, more than a million deaths occur every week, a rate only slightly higher than the nearly 1m cars produced weekly and greater than the estimated number of abortions (900,000 a week).

Moan about the spam or the e-mails we receive, but they represent only a minuscule fraction of the 1,000bn sent in the past week.

Roughly 20 e-mails are sent every day for every person in the world, which equates to a much higher average per user, given that most of the global population is still not connected.

Google searches are much rarer than e-mails – just 10bn or so in the past week.

More shocking are the number of cigarettes smoked (five for every Google search) and the number of dollars spent on illegal drugs – nearly one for every search.

Source: Worldometer