Fellow nerds, check out this math quiz on The New York Times‘ website that tests your ability to estimate colossal quantities with eight Fermi problems. Natalie Angier’s corresponding story is also worth a read.
Here is how it works. You take a monster of a ponder like, What is the total volume of human blood in the world? or, If you put all the miles that Americans drive every year end to end, how far into space could you travel? and you try to estimate what the answer might be. You resist your impulse to run away or imprecate. Instead, you look for a wedge into the problem, and then you calmly, systematically, break it down into edible bits. Importantly, you are not looking for an exact figure but rather a ballpark approximation, something that would be within an order of magnitude, or a factor of 10, of the correct answer. If you got the answer 900, for example, and the real answer is 200, you’re good; if you got 9,000, or 20, you go back and try to find where you went astray.
Have a go at this and see if you can figure out how many golf balls it would take to circle the equator, how many squirrels there are in Central Park and how many times a year the average American teenager says “like.” Geek out.