Think about the vastness of companies like McDonald’s, Facebook and Apple. The quantities involved in something like YouTube or Spotify - the millions or billions or trillions of bits of data they broadcast and transmit across the globe during every waking minute of every day.
These massive, dozen-digited numbers can often be pretty hard to comprehend. The difference between a million and a billion can seem pretty insubstantial - both are loads, you know? - yet it’s a thousandfold.
An ingenious coder named Neal Agarwal has put a lot of it into terms anyone can easily understand, with his project Every Second.
Using data about how many sales are made, songs are played and iPhones are bought, it demonstrates the sheer enormity of these numbers in a staggering but comprehensible way. Watch as 22,000 hours of YouTube video is watched in ten seconds! Marvel as Post Malone hits 1,000 plays on Spotify in under 20 seconds! Nod appreciatively at how many more pounds of cheese McDonald’s goes through than apples! Learn that Happy Meals sell more than coffees, which in turn sell more than Big Macs, and tuck that knowledge away in the back of your head in the hope it’ll come up some day…
It’s a fascinating thing to look at - seeing the sheer volume involved in all these things is kind of staggering. The exact second you bought an iPhone, eight other people bought an iPhone as well. And, possibly, nobody bought an Apple Watch (they’re sold at a rate of about two every five seconds, so the precise second the momey left your account might not have coincided with a watch purchase).
Weirdly, the one that is possibly the most mindblowing is his animal heartbeat comparison. Did you know a hamster’s heart beat 15 times as fast as that of an elephant? Or how a turkey’s pulse measures up to that of a giraffe?
You do now!
(It’s about 28 Big Macs globally every second, by the way. Madness. Delicious, delicious, artery-clogging madness.)
(Images: iStock / everysecond)
