What 3600 feels like

The number of American soldiers who have been killed in Iraq is rapidly approaching 3600. I knew none of them, but I know that none of them deserve to be included in a number as massive as 3600. But what do such massive numbers mean? I think we are used to the physical reality of small numbers. We can think about 5 or 10 or 100 in real terms, because these are sets of objects that are common in our daily life experiences.

Sure, you may be thinking, I paid $300,000 for my house...but I am sure you didn't pay it in ones you've been stuffing in your mattress from the tip jar at the coffee shop where you may work, counting it out one by one. Money was electronically transferred between financial institutions in less than a second. Every once in a while, we find a box of 500 nails, or 1000 plastic bags, but even then, we don’t often really have an experience with all 500 or 1000 at once. Over the years you use the nails one or two at a time, or accumulate the bags in your drawer, in batches of 5 or 10 every time you go to the store. You don't really have a sudden understanding of 1000 bags until the sleepless night you take them from your drawer and put them in a pile, or 500 nails until you accidentally knock them on the floor and have to pick each and every one up.

Perhaps an understanding through analogy, temporality, spatiality?

Sit still for one hour and count, one number a second. At the end of that long and boring hour, you will hit 3600.

See the sea of periods below? That is 3600 periods.

........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................
........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................

3600 is the number of days in 9.86 years.

Want to drive from New York to Los Angeles? Drive 3600 miles west and you'll end up in the Pacific Ocean, because L.A. is only 2800 miles from New York.

Want to build a time Machine and go back and have a long chat with Socrates (I would like to give him a piece of my mind about that whole thing about physical reality not mattering)…go back 3600 years and you’ll have overshot him by about 800 years. In fact, you would have also missed Ancient Greece and have ended up in one of Homer’s stories.

One of the folks who visits my site has a project on plastic bags with a counter of the number of plastic bags used so far this year. Last I checked it was up to 231,253,112,013. Which is far more than the number of seconds I have lived this far in my life (I am 30): 480,924,000.

How do we think about such large numbers? How can we make large numbers more accessible to our reasoning so that we can think better about quantities Because I want a subjective experience of a large number that carries representational heft. I want to know what 200,000 feels like when someone tells you that over 200,000 people died in the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or what 800,000 feels like when I am told that the Rwandan genocide killed up to 800,000 people, or what 6 million feels like when I am told that 6 million people died in the holocaust?

And I want to feel what 3600 feels like when I discover that 3600 Americans have sacrificed their lives in the Iraq war.