Tuesday, October 17, 2006

And many more!

Today is my blog's birthday. 4 years old. It started out at a different address (pshift2.blogspot.com) and with a different name (Patent Ambiguity) and with a different look (honestly, I don't remember, but for a long time it had blue lines...you can still check out pshift2 if you are really curious. I don't know why blogger hasn't deleted it off the internet.) but it's always had the same old writer.

If blogger ever gets around to making the beta version available to everyone, I'll be doing a major overhaul to my blog. As it is, I'm (slowly) going back and deleting old entries that are just boring nonsense. (I've deleted two so far. Woo!)

In other news, but still related to the title - today, supposedly, was the birthday of the 300 millionth United Statesian.
I say "supposedly" because I don't trust the accuracy of census...es. (Censi?) What about people who have gone missing? How long must a person be missing before they're considered dead? What about fake IDs? What about people who don't have Social Security numbers at all? What about people who were born at home and/or not in a hospital and have not gone "on the record"? (Granted, that's probably a very small number, but I know of at least one.)
What about people who lie to the census takers?
What about the people who drop off the grid altogether (by choice)? And what about undiscovered indigenous tribes (okay, there are probably NONE left in the US, and very very few anywhere in the world, but they do exist)?
All of those people who aren't being counted (or are being miscounted, maybe) means that we really don't know how many humans there are in the US or in the world, and we never will.

That being said, 300 million is a lot of people.

Oh, and courtesy of Anthropik's article on this matter, here's The Daily Show's take:

2 comments:

Amy said...

You used to have those awesome different colored circles, remember that? Those were awesome!

Simon said...

Happy Fourday! Yours is still one of my favourite blogs.