Tuesday, 16 February 2010

Is this a good use of time and human resources?

I was thinking today about the time we spend cutting our fingernails. Assume for the sake of argument that we each do it roughly once a week and it takes about a minute. I reckon that means that worldwide there are on average something like half a million of us cutting our fingernails at any particular moment. Just think what half a million people could do if they weren't all cutting their fingernails....

2 comments:

  1. On the other hand, think about what they couldn't do if they didn't: scratch their heads, pick their noses, remove their scabs, scrape drops of food off their clothes, draw on frosty windows, pluck guitar strings....

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  2. Yes, but those are harder to estimate - too many unknown variables.

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