Jan. 31st, 2010

sigmonster: Highly zoomed in portion of a Julia set (a fractal image in the complex plane). (Default)
The Ghost Map, Steven Johnson, UK Penguin p'back, page 85:
"At the height of a nineteenth-century cholera outbreak, a thousand Londoners would often die of the disease in a matter of weeks - out of a population that was a quarter the size of modern New York."


Page 87:
"During the epidemics of the late 1840s and the 1850s, a thousand Londoners would typically die of cholera in a matter of weeks — in a city a quarter the size of present-day New York — and the deaths would barely warrant a headline."


I mean, I know attention spans are said to be falling, but come on. I guess I should be grateful it wasn't the facing page.

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