Switch Off, Don’t You Know It’s Shutdown Day

Today is Shutdown Day, so what may I ask are you doing here, reading the Sciencetext blog, if you’re able you should be outside enjoying the fresh air or mooching about doing something else that requires no electricity. And, just in case you were wondering, I posted in advance when the Shutdown Day countdown timer tells me it is 2 Days, 8 hours, 7 minutes, and 34 seconds to go, so plenty of time to hit the publish button…just.

Interestingly, there’s a Shutdown Day video on Youtube, which I’ll only link to, to save you from procrastinating any further. Anyway, the video claims that there are well over 1 billion people on the net (one significant figure used in that figure, that’s fine as a half (0.5) decent estimate), but then they calculate that to be equivalent to 372,609,004,374 hours of usage each year (or 1020148274.56482992395 hours used on Shutdown Day alone). But, as you will have come to expect, this site cannot take such figures lying down, they talk of well over a billion and then calculate a number of annual hours with 12 significant figures, a huge leap in precision. And, just to slam the point home, we calculated the number of usage “hours” by dividing their figure by the most accurate value for the length of the year we could find and now display it with 21 sig figs, which is, as you should know by now, ludicrous.

Still it is a worthy cause, so shutdown now.