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China Has More Honors Students Than We Have Students (and other interesting facts)
Posted by Chris Knudsen on October 5th, 2006
I blogged last week about jobs growth in the US and where we seem to be going as a society. As a follow up to that, take a look at these facts pulled together by a friend, Brett Zabel, at Wasatch High School. It really puts a lot into perspective…
- If you are one in a million in China, there are 1,300 people just like you.
- The smartest top 25% of people in China represents a population greater than all of North America.
- China will soon have more english speakers in their population than any other country in the world.
- In the next eight minutes, 60 babies will be born in America. 351 will be born in India.
- By the age of 38 you will have had between 10 and 14 jobs.
- 1 in 4 Americans are working in the first year of their current job.
- The U.S. ranks 20th in the world for broadband penetration.
- In 2002 Nintendo invested more in R&D than the federal government (excludes military R&D).
- 1 in 8 married U.S. couples met online.
- There are 2.7 billion searches on Google each month. Where were these questions addressed to before Google?
- There are more than 6 billion sms messages sent everyday.
- There are 540,000 words in the english language. Five times more than there were in 1800.
- 3,000 books are published daily.
- More knowledge exists in one week of the New York Times than a person was able to access in their entire lifetime in the 1800’s.
- 1.5 exabytes of information will be created this year. That’s more than was created in the previous 5,000 years.
- What a college freshman learns this year will be outdated by his junior year of college.
- Fiber optics capacity is tripling every six months.
- The $100 laptop project will ship 50 to 100 million laptops per year to people in underdeveloped countries. There were 47 million laptops shipped world wide last year.
- By 2023 a $1000 computer will exceed the capacity of the human brain.
- By 2047 a $1000 computer will exceed the capacity of the human race.
One similar note, check out this story on how the baby boomers are about to suck the life out of the economy as they begin to retire in droves. Fed Chief Bernanke calls America’s entitlement programs “unsustainable”.
The world is changing. The playing field is leveling. Are you prepared?
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All very interesting facts/opinions (depending on how you skew the stats) They all have their legitimacy within the nature of the beast. All these assumptions are completely relative to the human experience of each individual life. Due to the complexities of the mind and spirt, people will survive and pursue happiness regardless of whether or not we have flying cars, perpetual motion machines, cold fusion, free energy or computers that claim to exceed the capacity of the human race. Which by the way, will never happen. Technology will never stop expanding and the human spirit will never stop searching for more. The human experience is an all enveloping cataclysm of creativity. We were all born with the God-like ability to create our life and our reality. The expansion of technology is and was inevitable, and the fact that it is expanding at an exponential rate will not change the fundamentals that exist within all of us (Love, Faith, Memories, Creativity, Emotions and our ever expanding senses). Expand those pillars of the human experience exponentially and teach principles of collective consciousness and computers will never come within a billion light years of the human mind.
The reason our vocabulary has grown 5 times since 1800 is because people are experiencing the world in ways that couldn’t properly be explained with our limited vocabulary. Every new word I learn brings on a whole new level of consciousness about the world around me.
The only way a computer could work like the human mind is if every input of memory exploded into a nuclear reaction that created an infinite and similar reaction to every other particle. Then you would need to times that by an infinite amount of possibilities, divided by every living organism that has ever existed and all of their own personal experiences. Even Einstein couldn’t create the mathematics of infinity. Humans are proving that infinity is just a small dot on the realm of possibility.
College was not a place for me to memorize books that were written by people that read more books that I did. College was and should be a catalyst for personal discovery. Every new piece of information ties to every fiber of our soul and synchronizes with the experiences in our lives and others. Books evolve much like people, societies, and technologies. Every book we read is hopefully, the best of what has been discovered up to that point in time. We shouldn’t be nervous about advancement. We should embrace it.
“The only way we are going to stay ahead of the curve is to cultivate and hone our finest abilities and use our expanding technologies to lead people in the direction of their greatest strengths. There is and never should be a standard curriculum.â€
The playing field may be leveling, but the possibilities have never been more abundant.
Left by Jason Baker on 10/05/2006