My friend Alan emailed me the other day informing me that the US government spends the average amount of tax generated by one person in 2.4 seconds. The only citing of this I can find is from a site entitled gullible.info, although I can quite easily believe its truth.
So, assuming the figure is taken as an average of everyone (approximately 300m people), that means that the government would take 720m seconds to spend everyone's tax, or 12m minutes; 200,000 hours; 8,333 days or 31.5 years.
Although the maths here is somewhat crude, it's worrying given that the life expectancy is more than double that figure. No wonder the deficit keeps mounting.
I don't have the equivalent stats for the UK, although I expect it paints a similarly bleak picture, although probably not quite as pronounced.
By all accounts the literally condition continues (see earlier post), with Robin Cousins reporting from Torino last night on the Bulgarian ice dancing pair being, quite literally, on fire during their rehearsal. As Steve rightly pointed out, this must be both hazardous and detrimental to good skating conditions.
Finally, again courtesy of Alan, some stats that counter human instinct but that certainly add up. They result in the following baseball scenario being feasible:
- Johnny Damon has a better batting average than Derek Jeter over the first half of the season, and a better average than Jeter in the second half of the season, yet ends the season with a worse batting average than Jeter
The conundrum was given by Microsoft's Ronny Kohavi in a deck about data mining. Here's the proof by example. X/Y =Z, where X = hits, Y = at bats, Z = batting average:
First half of season
- Johnny Damon: 4/10 = 0.400
- Derek Jeter: 35/100 = 0.350
Second half of season
- Johnny Damon: 25/100 = 0.250
- Derek Jeter: 2/10 = 0.200
Total season
- Johnny Damon: 29/110 = 0.264
- Derek Jeter: 37/110 = 0.336
It's an odd one to get your head around, and relies on injuries early on for Damon, and later on for Jeter.
