More fun with the screen saver function. An obsolete estimate by the Census Bureau, no matter how fast I post it.

I was idly curious about the world’s population today. When I was a child, it was generally estimated to be three billion, a number that lingered for some time after the estimate hit that milestone in 1960. As Tom Lehrer sang: “Nearly three billion hunks of well-done steak.” The four billion milestone came in 1974, back in the heyday of overpopulation scare books like The Population Bomb.

Hard to image that many people, 7.6 billion or 329.6 million for that matter. Make that impossible to imagine. Yet they’re out there, more or less that many, beyond the walls of my house.