Population Growth Gets 
Going Around in Circles

The U.S. population reached a landmark of sorts, yesterday at 2:29 p.m., according to the Census Bureau. Statistically speaking, we’re now about 314,159,265 souls. The announcement has caused enormous excitement in some quarters, since it could be put as 100 million times 3.14159265, which is the number pi.
Somehow we fail to fully appreciate such bubbly cheers about ‘the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter,’ if we think about what it really means: we’re multiplying way too fast. Wasn’t just the other day when we reached 300 million? So we thought about what happened during Halloween, last year.
In fact, we’re republishing our post about that even bigger landmark, announced by the U.N. last October: the world’s population reached seven billion. Then, as now, we had a hard time finding reasons to celebrate the hardly-tangible but very real event. And it’s not that the world’s got so much better ever since.
You may say that we’re coming a bit too hard on the American innate sense of turning most of everything for its ‘entertaining’ value. So the news coverage made sure to include, with some dubious sense of pride, that ‘U.S. residents account for about one out of every 22 people on Earth.’ Whoopee, Ms. Goldberg.
Being half-empty cup kind of people, we instead zoomed elsewhere on the official announcement. Right where it says that at every eight seconds, a baby cries for the first time, and most likely for food, Continue reading →