Facts and figures

Miscellaneous

 * August 2008 The number of suicides in England has reached a record low, figures show.

Technology

 * MLC-flash SATA II drive has speeds of 200MBps read and 160MBps sequential write
 * June 2008 - The whole laptop market makes around 5 million laptops per month - According to the video, in about a year, OLPC will be making around 1 million a month...

Medicine

 * '22,146 American doctors in residency programs in the United States specializing in primary care' in 2006
 * Clinician visits in 2005:
 * Mental health 156m
 * Back issues 139m

Scale

 * 1.3-micron speck about 100th the diameter of a human hair. A human hair is about 100 microns wide.

Statistics

 * '200 million chickens raised in South Carolina'
 * (May 2008) 'In the U.S., there are approximately 2,000 landfill sites. The country generates about 230 million tons of solid waste a year.'
 * The United States Department of Energy estimates that if algae fuel replaced all the petroleum fuel in the United States, it would require 15,000 square miles (40,000 square kilometers), which is a few thousand square miles larger than Maryland, or 1.3 Belgiums.  This is less than 1/7th the area of corn harvested in the United States in 2000.
 * June 2008 - 2007 giving - US - 306 million dollars - 38 billion in foundation grants...
 * June 2008 "There are nearly 20 million state and local government employees in the country." [USA]

Economics

 * Estimated that US will pay $440 billion to import 10+ million barrels of crude/day

Engineering

 * Intel's 6 core chip - 'Dunnington is composed of... 1.9 billion transistors'
 * (May 2008) 'Intel says it expects more than 50 million of these netbooks to be sold by 2011. It's introduced a tiny, low-power processor to run them called Atom, which puts 47 million transistors on a chip about the size of a penny.'