How to abuse a System of Quantities - the human mole
I was reading a science fiction ebook and an exchange along the lines of,
"I'm afraid we may have a mole or two in our midst."
"You mean spies?"
caught my eye. And, I couldn't help it, I thought "A mole of spies ... that sounds like an awful lot of spies. Surely somebody would have noticed before then?". That's the danger of having, a few minutes previously, read a post by
So, by the titular abuse of notation, ...
There you have it. The world population is about 13 femtomoles and, in case you were wondering, the total number of humans estimated to have existed is 166 femtomoles. And as if I didn't feel insignificant enough before, I certainly do after noting that I'm only 1.6 yoctomoles - thank you very much Mathcad Prime Express 7.
... maybe I've made a typo somewhere and it should be an ego-boosting megamole?
By a great effort of will, I stopped my fingers from calculating the energy output from a mole of people and how much land they'd need to produce enough food to exist on (and live in without cooking themselves with their own body heat). [3]
... OK, so I didn't quite catch my fingers in time and a molesworth of people produce about 48 yottawatts, and that's a lottawatts[2].
Stuart
[2] Yes, all this just for that. Shah Guido G strikes again.
[3] (I do not want to be the sanitation engineer responsible for dealing with a mole of people!)