Morfternight
The Newsletter That Tickles Our Brains — issue 032|2022-05-04
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Hello! I am Paolo Belcastro. You are reading this because you subscribed to Morfternight, the weekly newsletter about leadership, product management, distributed teams, life, and anything that tickles our brains. Thank you for being a Morfternighter! If you like it, please forward it to your friends. Also, if someone forwarded this to you, subscribe to receive your own.
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👋 Hello Friend, and welcome to Morfternight, the newsletter that likes numbers!
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🔢 Throughout history, we got used to larger and larger numbers.
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The Romans used 'M' to indicate a thousand and didn't have good tools to express much larger numbers.
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Here's a quote from Six Easy Pieces, Richard Feynman's Caltech Physics lectures, that I highly recommend:
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There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.
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The classes took place in the early '60s.
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The biggest companies in the world now have market caps in the trillions.
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The problem with such large numbers is that most of us think we understand them, but really, we don't.
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I encountered a great example illustrating the difference between a million and a billion:
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If I tell you, "let's meet in a million seconds," when will we meet?
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- We'll meet in 11 days, 13 hours, and 40 minutes.
But if I tell you, "let's meet in a billion seconds," when will we meet now?
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- We'll meet in 31 years, 8 months, and 5 days.
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🧠 Explaining how large, huge numbers are is hard. It's an art more than a science.
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Yesterday I randomly found a video where Tim Urban of Wait but why fame attempts an explanation of the number 52!
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52! is 52 factorial, as in 52x51x50x49x...x4x3x2x1
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It's an exciting number, as Tim mentions, because it represents the number of possible different orders in which a deck of 52 cards can be stacked. He underlines how big it is to explain why it is virtually impossible for any deck of cards to ever be randomly ordered like another one.
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80658175170943878571660636856403766975289505440883277824000000000000
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That's 68 digits. It is a very, very large number.
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Once you are done with it, remember that should you put the two jokers back in the deck, bringing it to 54 cards, the number of permutations would be 2,862 times bigger!
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👽 Let's change subjects before these numbers give us all a headache.
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(I try very hard to never think about the infinite, as I systematically end up feeling nauseous.)
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Here's an aspect of my personal story I recently shared somewhere else that I feel compelled to share here too.
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- Cut bread off entirely.
- Seek professional help.
- I don't measure anything.
- I don't really pay attention.
- I feel much better physically.
- I feel much better mentally.
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You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.
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That's it for today! You can find more of my stuff on paolo.blog, and if you think that someone you know could enjoy Morfternight, the newsletter to share, please forward it to them or send them this link to subscribe. Cheers! Paolo
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