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Daily 009: Millions Monday - Direct Democracy Math

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Summary

Gaga pit opens officially. Year-long clerk elections announced. Minecraft building and history discussion. Millions Monday calculates how long it would take to hear 8 billion people speak (16,000 years).

Transcript

0:00 All right, welcome to Arts and Ideas in the Air, Under the Tent, and Around Baltimore.
0:08 This is your daily briefing of the goings ons at Arts and Ideas.
0:12 Today we have a very active field going on here.
0:15 We've got people in the Gaga Pit, we've got people trying to build a shade structure,
0:20 we've got people swinging with parts of the shade structure, we've got a magic game going
0:26 on into the 25,000th round, perhaps, and we've got some people just lying about doing what
0:34 I'd want to do.
0:35 That's right, people, we've got everything going on right here under the tent and in
0:39 the field.
0:40 I hope all you cool cats at home are having a great day, too.
0:46 So it was cold this morning, but it's really warmed up.
0:50 I'm detecting a pattern here.
0:51 I feel like, you know, cold in the morning, warm in the afternoon.
0:55 I really think we're on to a pattern here.
0:56 I might write a paper on it, you know, so it could be earth-shattering, the temperature
1:01 dynamics here.
1:02 So what happened today?
1:03 Well, we had our mandatory announcements where it was announced that anyone intending to
1:09 graduate this year should let Phil or Caroline know before November 1st, assuming they stayed
1:16 to graduation clerks, which we also announced the year-long clerk elections.
1:21 It's posted in Discord, it'll be posted in the dining room for those in person.
1:27 And if anyone wants to run, just sign up, message me, put in Discord, whatever you like.
1:36 We also had, let's see, a Minecraft building, not sure if it was competition or just gathering
1:45 online, and our first corporation meeting of the year, Lavery Corporation, it had an
1:50 astounding turnout at three people.
1:53 Really exciting.
1:54 But we really wanted a budget to buy a book that someone's really wanting to read.
1:58 So we're excited about that.
2:00 And there was also the Monday history discussion, which I assume went swimmingly well.
2:06 All right.
2:07 But the biggest news, as I alluded to before, is that our Gaga pit is open and ready to
2:12 be used.
2:13 It has been full of people since Friday afternoon and this morning and right now.
2:21 We've got people of all shapes and sizes in there from five years old up to, I don't know,
2:30 12, 15, and a ball runs away.
2:32 If you're not familiar with Gaga, well, join the club.
2:36 Not either.
2:37 But it looks like a game where you kind of like hunch over and you hit the ball to keep
2:41 it on the ground and you're trying to hit other people with it.
2:43 It's kind of like dodgeball only without any kind of pain or suffering.
2:47 So that's fun.
2:49 And people just jump over the ball and it's all pretty exciting.
2:55 So for all you people here in person, I hope you check out the Gaga pit.
3:00 And if you're online and thinking about coming in, well, that's just one more reason to come
3:06 in, is that Gaga pit.
3:07 It's pretty epic and awesome.
3:11 Let's see.
3:12 Ah, yes.
3:13 On this podcast, I would really love to have conversations with some people, school meeting
3:19 members who want to share something, maybe it's something you're working on, maybe you
3:24 just want to say something, maybe you just want to get your voice on the air, whatever.
3:27 Just let me know.
3:29 And I'd love to arrange that and have a nice little conversation.
3:34 And let's see, up on deck for tomorrow, we've got school meeting.
3:38 So that'll be at one o'clock as usual.
3:42 The same people who were on the team last week should be on it this week, but anyone's
3:46 welcome to attend and it's always a highlight of many people's weeks.
3:52 We love debating.
3:54 Speaking of debating, so this is Millions Monday.
3:58 That means I take a problem that hopefully will involve millions or something or large
4:05 numbers and see what I can make of it.
4:08 Today I thought I'd do, what if we ran the world by direct democracy, meaning everyone
4:14 in the world got a voice.
4:15 Let's say that everyone got to speak for one minute.
4:20 How long would it take to listen to all that?
4:23 Well, our world population is somewhere between seven and eight billion people right now.
4:28 So let's just start off with a billion because that's nice and easy to get to.
4:33 And then we can just multiply it by seven or eight.
4:36 So one minute gives us 60 people in one hour to speak.
4:41 That's a lot of people to speak, but pretty small compared to what we're trying to achieve.
4:46 Now there's 24 hours in a day and 365 days or so in a year.
4:53 So you could do that by hand, you can do that with a calculator, but I like to do it wrong.
4:59 So 365, that's basically 400, 24, that's basically 20, and 60, well, we'll keep 60 cause 60 is
5:09 nice.
5:10 So 400 times 20 times 60 is about 480,000.
5:15 And so we'll just round that up to half a million.
5:17 So in one year we could listen to half a million people speaking for one minute at a time.
5:22 That's pretty cool, but still pretty long way from what we need to achieve.
5:30 So in two years we could do a million and to get to a billion, we've got to multiply
5:34 that by a thousand.
5:35 So that's 2000 years to listen to a billion people talking for a minute.
5:40 After about, for eight billion people, that would take 16,000 years.
5:45 So that's a pretty long time.
5:48 Give the Ents a run for their money for debating something and, you know, maybe listening to
5:56 everyone speak, well, maybe there's a better way.
6:01 Just for all you also into these kinds of numbers of watching and listening to everything,
6:06 I believe that YouTube is uploading 500 hours of video a minute.
6:11 So that would take a long time to get through as well.
6:17 Hope you enjoyed Millions Monday and I'll talk to you and see you all another time.