Numbers can be tricky.  As a scientist I am more used to dealing with numbers than many, but it is still hard to wrap my head around what millions and billions of something really look like. Visual representations of large numbers can be quite striking. Chris Jordan is an artist who creates incredible images to show the scale of many of the issues facing our society, particularly our rampant consumerism and wastefulness.

Below is one of his pieces, a recreation of Serat’s “Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte” made out of 106,000 aluminum cans.  Why that number?  Because that is how many cans Americans use every 30 seconds.

You can see a presentation by Chris Jordan showing some of his other pieces if you click below.  It is about 10 minutes long, and has some very striking imagery. Part of his thesis is that there are many small things which we all do unconsciously, and while on an individual scale they are relatively harmless, once there are millions or billions of people doing those things, they add up and put a large strain on our world.

His talk is from TED, the Technology, Entertainment, & Design Conference which I only recently learned about.  Every year the conference organizers invite a bunch of smart people together for a set of very interesting presentations.  All of the conference videos are being released online for free.  The three that I’ve watched so far have all been quite good. There are now hundreds of talks which have been posted to their website, so I’ll try to point out the more interesting ones as I come across them.