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Is That a Big Number?
Impressive statistics are thrown at us every day - the cost of health care; the size of an earthquake; the distance to the nearest star; the number of giraffes in the world.We know all these numbers are important - some more than others - and it's vaguely unsettling when we don't really have a clear sense of how remarkable or how ordinary they are. How do we work out what these figures actually mean? Are they significant, should we be worried, or excited, or impressed? How big is big, how small is small?With this entertaining and engaging book, help is at hand. Andrew Elliott gives us the tips and tools to make sense of numbers, to get a sense of proportion, to decipher what matters. It is a celebration of a numerate way of understanding the world. It shows how number skills help us to understand the everyday world close at hand, and how the same skills can be stretched to demystify the bigger numbers that we find in the wider contexts of science, politics, and the universe.Entertaining, full of practical examples, and memorable concepts, Is That A Big Number? renews our relationship with figures. If numbers are the musical notes with which the symphony of the universe is written, and you're struggling to hear the tune, then this is the book to get you humming again.
348 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 14, 2018
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170 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
July 17, 2018
This is a curious book, which has the very worthy intent of giving us more of a feel for numbers - so, as the author points out, it's not really about maths at all. It's more about statistics in the original meaning of a collection of numbers about a state, rather than the modern analytical sense of the word. Andrew Elliott approaches this problem with a very individual and amiable manner, giving all kinds of approaches, while throwing in little quizzes, tables of comparisons and more.
Broadly, Elliott divides our mechanisms for assessing numbers into five. The first is landmark numbers, which act as a known milestick - classic examples would be the approach often adopted by newspapers of measuring things in blue whales, football pitches or Eiffel Towers, though it's about far more than measuring height or volume. The second technique is visualisation - picturing the numbers in some sort of visual context. Thirdly he suggests dividing the number up into smaller parts, and fourthly bringing them down to size by using the as proportions or ratios. Finally he points out the value of logarithmic scales, even though these can result in misunderstanding some of the other measures.
What we get here is a real mix - some parts of the book are genuinely fun, others are, frankly, only of interest to a number fanatic. The biggest problem here is that, while there are genuinely interesting attempts to give experience of comparing or visualising numbers, the way the book meanders with little narrative structure makes it difficult to keep on top of what's happening. It's very scattergun, with a fair amount of the material that was hard to find interesting - such as lots of lists of comparisons of things where the numbers are vaguely similar. (For example, the time since the earliest known writing is about 25 x the time since the birth of Darwin. And we care why?)
There are little quizzes at the start of each section which ask, for example, which is the most numerous of Boeing 747s built up to 2016, the population of Falkland Islands, grains of sugar in a teaspoon and satellites in orbit in 2015. These are quite fun, though it's a pain looking up the answer in the back of the book. And that specific example (the first) also irritates as it involves comparing something with an exact value (number of satellites, say) with a wild approximation - we're told there are more satellites as there are 4080 satellites versus 4000 grains of sugar in a teaspoon - but I'm sure a 'teaspoon of sugar' is not accurate to the nearest 80 grains.
Perhaps less of an issue, but still slight odd, is that a few of the facts are impressively out of date. Elliott uses a definition of the metre that has been obsolete since 1983 and there's a section on the Richter scale that fails to mention that it has been little used since the 1970s (although they sometimes mislabel it, the earthquake scale used on the news is not the Richter scale).
Those, though, are minor issues. While there is a much better book to help the reader get a real feel for how numbers are misused and how to understand big numbers better in Blastland and Dilnot's The Tiger That Isn't, I still found Is That a Big Number? interesting and I'm glad I read it.
Broadly, Elliott divides our mechanisms for assessing numbers into five. The first is landmark numbers, which act as a known milestick - classic examples would be the approach often adopted by newspapers of measuring things in blue whales, football pitches or Eiffel Towers, though it's about far more than measuring height or volume. The second technique is visualisation - picturing the numbers in some sort of visual context. Thirdly he suggests dividing the number up into smaller parts, and fourthly bringing them down to size by using the as proportions or ratios. Finally he points out the value of logarithmic scales, even though these can result in misunderstanding some of the other measures.
What we get here is a real mix - some parts of the book are genuinely fun, others are, frankly, only of interest to a number fanatic. The biggest problem here is that, while there are genuinely interesting attempts to give experience of comparing or visualising numbers, the way the book meanders with little narrative structure makes it difficult to keep on top of what's happening. It's very scattergun, with a fair amount of the material that was hard to find interesting - such as lots of lists of comparisons of things where the numbers are vaguely similar. (For example, the time since the earliest known writing is about 25 x the time since the birth of Darwin. And we care why?)
There are little quizzes at the start of each section which ask, for example, which is the most numerous of Boeing 747s built up to 2016, the population of Falkland Islands, grains of sugar in a teaspoon and satellites in orbit in 2015. These are quite fun, though it's a pain looking up the answer in the back of the book. And that specific example (the first) also irritates as it involves comparing something with an exact value (number of satellites, say) with a wild approximation - we're told there are more satellites as there are 4080 satellites versus 4000 grains of sugar in a teaspoon - but I'm sure a 'teaspoon of sugar' is not accurate to the nearest 80 grains.
Perhaps less of an issue, but still slight odd, is that a few of the facts are impressively out of date. Elliott uses a definition of the metre that has been obsolete since 1983 and there's a section on the Richter scale that fails to mention that it has been little used since the 1970s (although they sometimes mislabel it, the earthquake scale used on the news is not the Richter scale).
Those, though, are minor issues. While there is a much better book to help the reader get a real feel for how numbers are misused and how to understand big numbers better in Blastland and Dilnot's The Tiger That Isn't, I still found Is That a Big Number? interesting and I'm glad I read it.
December 5, 2018
I appreciate the author's interest in numeracy and the concluding chapters were great. There were times when I thought the comparisons between different items wasn't interesting but the examples help put numbers in comparison to each other.
The physical quality of the book is quite high with thick shiny pages and crisp text.
The physical quality of the book is quite high with thick shiny pages and crisp text.
February 2, 2022
Topic on making sense of the world through basic and intuitive numerical literacy (numeracy). Numbers are thrown around everywhere on everything and they are meaningless unless we can get a feel for them and put them into perspectives. While the message is good, the book is too verbose.
November 29, 2018
You need to be a bit of a number geek to a read this book. I can imagine a lot of people abandoning it halfway through.
It is a bit disconnected and some parts are frankly boring. Still, overall, it is a light and easy read and I can say I learned some interesting things about numbers and units.
It is a bit disconnected and some parts are frankly boring. Still, overall, it is a light and easy read and I can say I learned some interesting things about numbers and units.
March 18, 2021
Secondo me non raggiunge il suo scopo
Sarà perché è il secondo libro di fila che leggo sulla spannometria, ma non è che questo lavoro mi sia piaciuto così tanto. Elliott punta molto sulla capacità di visualizzare i grandi numeri, e quindi da un lato lavora su immagini facilmente riconoscibili, come quella di uno stadio gremito di gente e diviso in vari settori, e dall'altro inserisce enormi elenchi di misure che dovrebbero servire da ancore per avere un'idea delle dimensioni in vari campi. Ecco, secondo me quella non è una grande idea, per l'ottima ragione che ti limiti a sostituire un numero sconosciuto con un altro numero che però non ti dice molto: più semplice imparare a fare confronti con cose vicino a noi, tipo visualizzare il debito pubblico calcolando quale parte ciascuno di noi si troverebbe a proprio carico. Altre parti sono più interessanti, però: per esempio, la sua difesa dei logaritmi è assolutamente condivisibile. In definitiva, non me la sento di consigliarlo, nonostante la buona traduzione di Valeria Lucia Gili. (Che stranamente non era indicata nella versione che ho preso da MLOL; però mancava parte del colophon, probabilmente era uscita male)
Sarà perché è il secondo libro di fila che leggo sulla spannometria, ma non è che questo lavoro mi sia piaciuto così tanto. Elliott punta molto sulla capacità di visualizzare i grandi numeri, e quindi da un lato lavora su immagini facilmente riconoscibili, come quella di uno stadio gremito di gente e diviso in vari settori, e dall'altro inserisce enormi elenchi di misure che dovrebbero servire da ancore per avere un'idea delle dimensioni in vari campi. Ecco, secondo me quella non è una grande idea, per l'ottima ragione che ti limiti a sostituire un numero sconosciuto con un altro numero che però non ti dice molto: più semplice imparare a fare confronti con cose vicino a noi, tipo visualizzare il debito pubblico calcolando quale parte ciascuno di noi si troverebbe a proprio carico. Altre parti sono più interessanti, però: per esempio, la sua difesa dei logaritmi è assolutamente condivisibile. In definitiva, non me la sento di consigliarlo, nonostante la buona traduzione di Valeria Lucia Gili. (Che stranamente non era indicata nella versione che ho preso da MLOL; però mancava parte del colophon, probabilmente era uscita male)
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews