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Thursday, August 30, 2007

This Has Detailed Statistics: It Must be True

Or not.

You may have encountered something like this, in a blog or elsewhere: "If we could shrink the earth's population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same, it would look something like the following."

What follows is a list of statistics which, at a quick read, seem plausible.

Snopes.com, in "Aisle of Man"(1), compares the statistics in this sample, collected in 2001, and compares them to the real world.

Granted, things have changed in the last six years: but not that much.

And the moral of this is: Check your facts before posting.

(1) Yes, that's the spelling - if it's within quotes and misspelled here at Apathetic Lemming of the North, the odds are very good that the original source used the alternatively-correct spelling.

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