Tuesday 1 May 2012

Number crunching...

Since Novemeber 25th 2011, when I first got my current running watch, I have run:
118 times
490.82 km
For 46:57:50 h:m:s
At an average speed of 10.5 km/hour
At an average cadence of 81 spm
Running 434,122 steps
Burning 39,211 Calories
That's quite a bit. It's strange when you add it all up like that. The figures become so large they're meaningless. Let's break it down: on average I run 4.15 km, each run burns 332 Calories, takes 3679 steps to complete and lasts for a little under 24 minutes. OK, it's starting to make some sense. Sometimes it's useful to crunch the numbers a bit; place them on a human scale so they mean something.

Over the weekend I found this population calculator on the BBC's website. It calculated that when I was born I was the 3,168,926,914th person alive on earth and the 76,938,919,834th person to have lived since history began. Furthermore, living in the UK with a population of 62,345,006, we have an annual population growth rate of +0.6%; that's 85 births, 66 deaths and 23 immigrants every hour. Being male and living where I do, my life expectancy is 77.4 years. I love stuff like this. I hate it too.

It's all based on means, modes, medians, approximations, extrapolations and projections. I'm sure that were I able to submit other details about who I am it would alter the calculations. As it stands, it's a frivolity, a bit of fun. As with all statistics, the danger comes when such broad metrics are applied to quite specific instances. It's like a view from space; it says nothing about my life.

Lies, damned lies and statistics...

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