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CSMonitor editors share their favorite people to follow on Twitter

3. The Web Team: “What If Numbers”

  • By Steph Solis

Ever wonder how many ounces of gold it would take to buy one ounce of 64GB MemorySD cards? What about the average U.S. adult alcohol consumption in 1825, measured in shots of 80-proof liquor per person per day?
 
If any of these questions interest you, you’re in luck. There’s an entire Twitter account dedicated to them.

"What if Numbers," a Twitter account created by xkcd author Randall Munroe, lists a series of facts regarding numbers, from the number of cigarettes consumed by someone on a given day in 1963 (12) to the glide ratio of a northern flying squirrel (1.98).

One of the best fun facts on this account, according to Online News editor Eoin O'Carroll (@eoinocarroll), is from Feb. 26: “20: Top speed, in miles per hour, of a roadrunner.”

The Twitter account is actually an extension of the Mr. Munroe's “What If” science blog. The blog runs an answer to a hypothetical question related to math or physics every Tuesday, such as “What if you somehow managed to make a stereo travel at twice the speed of sound, would it sound backwards to someone who was just casually sitting somewhere as it flies by?”

Since "What If Numbers" was created in late January, the account has gained more than 26,000 followers.

Mr. O'Carroll describes Munroe's blog as a source of "accurate yet darkly humorous answers" to the multitude of outlandish and intricate questions he receives.
 
Each tweet includes a number and then proceeds to explain what the number is. Another example is a tweet from Feb. 1: “107: Speed record in miles per hour for a bicycle going downhill on a volcano.”
 

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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