The Death Toll, By Comparison

“The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of a million is a statistic.”

- Joseph Stallin

Most of us know that 3,000 people died on 9/11, but how many Americans know how many Katrina victims there were, or how many people died in the American Revolution. Did the Christian Crusades kill 100 times as many people as the Vietnam War? Or were they identical in their death tolls? Given how much we talk about historical human tragedies, it seems like something we should have a better handle on (via).

Tim Urban, from the popular website, waitbutwhy then goes on to show just how depict the numbers of people killed in hurricane Katrina, the Syrian War, and those killed in the Sichuan 2008 earthquake. He compares most all major wars, world wide car accidents per year, and The Black Death.

All in all, there are a lot of deaths.

And the numbers, when considering that they are people, that they are husbands, mothers, moms and dads, sons and daughters, that they are friends and neighbors and people who had names and lives, becomes so overwhelming that they are no longer relatable.

How can I even comprehend 200 million lives lost?

I can’t. But I can see J.F.K. riding in his car, his desperate wife holding his lifeless body, and I can hear his grainy voice as he addresses the nation.

Does that make me callous? Heartless?

Does that make Stalin right?

“We do a pretty good job of distracting ourselves from the whole ‘I’m gonna die one day’ thing” by distancing ourselves from the personal deaths - “That wouldn’t happen to me.” But we distance ourselves from the global, much closer to reality deaths (natural disasters, car accidents, etc) by seeing the casualties as numbers, not people.

For more on . . .

-N- Stuff : Waitbutwhy

The Process of Procrastination

Tim Urban has become one of the Internet’s most popular writers. With wry stick-figure illustrations and occasionally epic prose on everything from procrastination to artificial intelligence, Urban's blog, Wait But Why, has garnered millions of unique page views, thousands of patrons and famous fans like Elon Musk (Ted.com).

According to Tim Urban, his responsibilities include:

• Writing posts every Tuesday every Wednesday about his psychological shortcomings
• Picking a topic for the week’s post before realizing it’s icky after diving in and thinking “if only I were doing that other topic it would be so much easier”; switching to that other topic and realizing it’s incredibly icky too
• Opening three Chrome windows with 42 research tabs in each, just short of getting to that stressful zone where you can’t see the icon on the tabs anymore
• Pacing around in his underwear hating himself
• Drawing stick figures at a 2nd 4th grade skill level
• Drawing head circles ten times before finally drawing one that looks normal
• Not being an expert on things he writes about
• Getting yelled at by people who think he thinks he’s an expert on things he writes about
• Getting scolded by people for using profanity in writing
• Passionately underestimating how long each post will take to do

You can read his full dramatic nightmare story of what it was like to do a TED Talk