To be fair and balanced for the Information Addicts

I'll be the first to tell you, I don't really have a head for math.

In my Algebra classes throughout high school, spending time teaching myself the programming language of my calculator seemed a better investment of my time than watching someone tabulate proofs on an overhead. I talked to a math major once at the College of Charleston and it was really incredible to hear her talk about her linear passions. To math aficionados, numbers are the language of reality's creator and divide down deep enough and you'll finally find the pattern. I watched the movie "Pi" once and there's a really interesting scene where the characters talk about a mathematical pattern hiding everywhere in every day life.

So I got to thinking. While running today and thinking about Twitter and electronic communication, I came up with a way to look for the mathematical significance of my own online correspondence. I tallied up all of today's emails both sent and received (17 total) and started charting. For emails sent within San Francisco, I tabulated the distance between our two computers using rough neighborhood addresses in relation to the driving distance to my apartment. For everyone else across the country, a simple search through Google Maps gave me figures (driving distances between the two city limits) to base my data off of. Here's where things started blowing my mind.

All things being equal, if every individually sent email (from today alone) would have hopped off of my screen, sprouted feet and marched to their respective inboxes across the country, a flock of my sent emails would have accumulated 8,824.2 miles of travel. Just from today. While this number's impressive, the respective received emails, (again, from today alone) would have tracked double the distance at 16,773.8 miles (as I received more than I sent... today).

For those keeping score, that means that a cumulative distance of 25,598 miles would have been covered today alone by emails either coming or going from my computer, should they had to have been delivered by hand. To put things into perspective, the total distance around the equator of planet earth is 24,901.55 miles. Today alone, should one piece of mail had to cover the total representative distance of it's electronic counterparts, it would have traveled completely around Planet Earth with 697 miles to spare. All of this happens from the comfort of our homes and with simple few mouse clicks, and we don't even blink.

So I guess, in an attempt to be fair and balanced to the folks at Twitter, it must be acknowledged that everything comes at a cost. Think of how much gas gets saved, or CO2 emissions scrubbed out, or trees saved when we reserve correspondence to clicking buttons on a keyboard.

This is one of the reasons why people love getting handwritten letters, because we know that this physical object has traveled many long, actual miles to drop into our actual mailbox. Could you imagine life if we had instantaneous and authentic (physical) personal messages?

Sounds like a lucrative new business idea.