I'm going to be sloppy with population stats, rounding off as I see fit and not worrying about whether stats are from 1990 or 2000...

world popul: 6B (http://www.nat.org/population/)

US pop: 285M

NYC pop: 7.3M in 1990 (2.1M foreign-born); 20.2M metro area

China pop: 1.2B

Mexico city population (metro area): 17M; 9.8M in city itself

Japan pop: 125M

Tokyo pop: 7.8M city, 11.7M metro

US students: 49M K-12.

NYC students: 1 million (80k teachers) (public schools only?)

deaths during various atrocities of the 20th century ([WW2] 50M, Mao 48M, Stalin 20M...)

I like a nice historical Macro Timeline, also

Maybe doesn't belong here, but here's drawings of various buildings and objects (real and SciFi fictional) at a 1-pixel-per-meter scale.

The deepest point in the Earth's oceans is 36,200ft. The highest mountain peak is Everest at 29,035ft.

Some big human entertainment-group sizes:

• [American Idol] had 43M viewers for its final half-hour

• network-TV nightly-news: 27M total nightly viewers (that doesn't count CNN, [FoxNews], local, cable, etc.)

  • do those really pull 10x that?

• circulation of the NyTimes (in print): 1.1M

• GooGle: 66M monthly visitors

• MySpace members: 60M (mid-2006); 50M visitors in May'2006

• FlickR: 5M visitors May'2006

• Instant Messaging: [MSN] Messenger leads the pack with about 204 million subscribers, followed by YaHoo Messenger with 78 million and AIM with 64 million unique monthly users.

  • but Back in March, Nielsen/Netratings estimated that AOL had 53 million instant messaging users compared to the 27 and 22 million that [MSN] and Yahoo respectively had.

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