"Backup generators have failed numerous tests, according to project documents, and officials disagree about whether the cause is understood." Backup generators are magical unicorns that sit around all day and night until lightning strikes your luck. Likewise, they need regular maintenance and 'idle runs' a few times a year at least to ensure that they will turn over. Generators aren't store and forget machines, as we…
You guys make it sound like Bluffdale, Utah is akin to the Mojave. Here along the Wasatch Front the weather's fairly pleasant most of the year. This July we got an abnormally large number of days in the 100s, but usually it's quite livable.
A million isn't that big or unimaginable. There are a million cubic centimeters in a cubic meter. As for people, here's a picture of Glastonbury festival: http://www.andrews-sykes.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/06... That's about 100,000 people camped out. Picture 10 of those and you have your million. If everybody at the festival crowded shoulder-to-shoulder in front of pyramid stage, it would probably just about…
It's not that it's unimaginable, it's that we lack the necessary mental resolution to perceive both the entire set and its elements individually. A million might be just small enough to do that, but the average person doesn't have am intuitive notion of the number "one million" like we have of ten or twenty. Even for a thousand, you'll have to think of a seventh of a cup of rice, or something like that.
That's interesting, I'd never thought of visualizing a thousand of something that way - I'd have thought using tiny indistinguishable units that cover each other up is admitting defeat from the get-go. I've always thought in terms of those little centimeter blocks they have to visualize powers of ten in grade school. A thousand is simply a 10x10x10cm cube (a cubic litre), quite easy to visualize. There are a also a thousand millimeters in a meter, and a thousand people is also a common order of magnitude for a group of people in a school context (population of the school, or a single year of students, or the number of people attending a sports game, depending on the size of the school).