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Daily 152: Millions Monday - People Doing Math

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Summary

Pleasant day, spritzy. Visiting students (sibling + returning student from 2 years ago). New way for students to document activities for official purposes coming to school meeting. Operating on 3 staff this week. Swing board back. Vaccinated visitor observing tomorrow. Dancers Wednesday. Stars of Bethlehem (invasive weeds) dealt with using speaker's string trimmer. Millions Monday: how many doing math right now? 2M professionals + 5M students + 4M incidental = ~11 million.

Transcript

0:00 Welcome to ANI In the Air, Under the Tent, and Around Baltimore, your daily podcast
0:04 briefing of all the goings ons, ins and rounds, arts and ideas at very school. So
0:09 today was a fairly pleasant day. A little cloudy, a little spritzy, but otherwise
0:17 fairly nice. A lot of activity, lots of running around going on today, even now.
0:23 We have a couple of visiting students this week. One is the brother of existing
0:33 students and the other is someone who visited the school a couple years ago and
0:38 is now hopefully coming back to join us permanently. So, in the fall. Let's see, we
0:50 had our announcements today and yeah we might have a nice interesting thing to
1:02 add to school and school meeting tomorrow. A way for students to document
1:07 what they kind of do here for more official purposes. And I guess they'll be
1:15 creative writing later in the week and presumably article club and you know
1:22 tomorrow we've got school meeting. So yeah, we're operating on just three
1:31 staff this week and we expect that to be fine. Things are fairly reasonable and calm
1:42 right now. We're continuing to have more of our online students coming back and
1:47 kind of I think coming for you know for day after day you might say. There was
1:56 some fort building and the swing board came back today. That's cool. Tomorrow
2:03 we're going to have a visitor who will be just outside. He's been fully
2:08 vaccinated and he is interested in learning more about Sudbury school. So
2:14 they said sure you can come and sit under our tent and talk to people if you
2:18 want to. If they want to talk to him and just see what we do. We've got JC and
2:24 school meeting tomorrow so you'll at least get to observe that. I know that
2:30 he'll talk to us somewhat. Oh and of course Wednesday we get the dancers
2:36 coming back. That should be the last time they came over the weekend. I let them
2:46 use the carriage house and when I came to close it up the church next door was
2:53 having a big old wedding. So that was kind of cool to see although not everybody
2:59 was wearing masks so I don't know about that. Anyway um let's think what I've got
3:11 going on for what happened today. We also had our lawn mowed. There was a patch of
3:19 these stars of Bethlehem that went unmowed. No doubt our lawn guy thought it
3:26 was something Caroline was doing as she loves to have all these plants and stuff
3:32 around but yeah they're just weeds. Very invasive very quick-spreading weeds. So I
3:39 got my lawn mowing equipment from home. That's stuff I mentioned in a tip of the
3:45 Thursday the other day. Not sure how many weeks ago and came and I dealt with all
3:52 that and also dealt with some dandelions that somehow survived all the mowing. I
3:56 don't know those things are tough. Unfortunately I couldn't get to all the
4:02 dandelions before my power ran out. These are cordless so the batteries only have
4:06 so much charge but maybe tomorrow. Alright so today is Monday so I'm gonna
4:14 do Millions Monday. It's gonna be a math themed week this week so I thought I
4:24 could start off the day by asking how many people in this country are doing
4:28 mathematics right now and so let's get into it. Oh and it's raining it's raining
4:40 heavily and I'm under the tent so I'm good although unfortunately it's gonna
4:45 take me some time to get across with my computer but hopefully it'll be a brief
4:50 rain. Anyway so the math the math of it all. So we've got roughly 340 million
4:57 people in this country right now. I'm gonna say that maybe well let's see so
5:08 maybe 10% of our workforce is in a math related field. Science, engineers,
5:18 actuaries, accountants. Accountants very busy right now. You know Wall Street
5:24 types, actual mathematicians, they're pretty small fraction. You know social
5:31 scientists and you know academics and all that. So and then of course well
5:40 alright so if it's if it's 10% of our workforce and our workforce is about 60%
5:45 of the population well let's say half the population so let's say a hundred and
5:51 I don't know let's say 150 million people. Okay let's say that's our
6:01 workforce and 10% of them would be 15 million so it might be 15 million
6:13 people in a in a field of mathematical work shall we say. Okay now if you're one
6:23 of these math types how much of your day is spent doing actual math? So let's say
6:33 that their max day is eight hours probably some have longer days and let's
6:41 say half of it is taken up with meetings and staring off into space and then you
6:50 get a half a half a day of work out of you and maybe a quarter of that is
6:57 actually doing something math related. A lot of the stuff with engineers and
7:03 stuff you know you've got software and so I don't really know what to count it
7:06 but let's just go with an hour so one hour of the day and so let's say that's
7:15 an eighth an eighth of the thing so let's say that we had 16 million such
7:23 workers one eighth of that is 2 million so 2 million people potentially doing
7:28 math for their jobs right now. Now what else has math going on well there is if
7:38 you want to count it math education stuff right so that's maybe let's say an
7:45 hour a day for people having to learn math and let's say that is I know 10
7:57 years of one's life it's been in math classes or doing math learning or
8:06 whatever and conventional stuff not here but somewhere so an hour a day out of
8:15 same other eight hours so 1/8 of whatever and 10 years each year roughly
8:25 has 4 million people in it so 40 million so 40 million and 1/8 of that's 5
8:31 million so 2 million maybe actually doing math professionally right now 5
8:36 million maybe doing math for school stuff up to 7 million now what about
8:43 everybody else so take away the 40 million kids well I guess there's also
8:50 another 20 million who are like younger than that or even 30 million so 70
8:56 million from 340 minutes 270 million and then take away another what was it 16
9:06 million or something 20
9:09 it's gonna say 250 million let's say 250 million people left who are you know
9:17 quote normals so how many people normally how much do people normally use
9:24 math in their daily life and we're gonna be very generous here and be like any
9:29 kind of number stuff even doing recipes scaling that up anything you know like
9:35 how much do they use well I'm gonna just probably optimistic but I'm gonna say 10
9:42 minutes of their day again let's stick with this 8 hour day or maybe 10 hour
9:48 day 10 hour day and 10 minutes out of that is 1/6 of an hour and so you know
10:04 if you think of the 10 hours that we have there's sort of 60 units of 10
10:12 minutes right so 1/60 of the day and so 240 million people and 1/60 is take away
10:27 0 it's 24 divided by 6 is 4 million so 2 million professional I think I had was
10:36 it 5 million 5 million students and 4 million incidental normal math so maybe
10:44 11 million people doing math at any kind of given time during the middle of the
10:49 day you know when people are up and doing stuff so there you go that's my
10:57 guess all right well I hope you enjoyed how much math is being done it's a very
11:05 meta question so I enjoyed it anyway you all have a good one and I will see you
11:10 when I see you