“Mr. President, I have bad news: Three Brazilian soldiers were killed this week.”

“That’s terrible. But, um, exactly how many is a brazilian?”

I was talking with an immunologist about the coming flu pandemic. He noted that 100,000 units of vaccine on order was a fine idea – from the public relations point of view: “In a worst-case epidemic, if they were 100% effective, they’d reduce the death toll from 150,000,000 to 149,900,000.”

I started reading newspapers during the Eisenhower administration. (I liked Ike.) I’ve watched about a brazilian numbers flash by my visual cortex since then. Many of them were so large as to push the limits of human understanding. Often, the mere number of numbers has overwhelmed my ability to keep on processing their individual relevance. Distressingly many times, the numbers have been designed to confuse or mislead me.

This grumbly line of thought led me back to Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences, John Allen Paulos’ classic treatment of the whys and wherefores of bad thinking about numbers. I’ll come back to the approximately 443,00 words of this fine book another day. (Estimated by taking a ten-line sample, multiplying by the number of ten-line units on a page, and multiplying that by the number of pages in the book.) Let me try that again, counting one line and multiplying by the number of lines on that page and then by the 180 pages of the book. Nuts, maybe that was 57,600 words? Ah, what’s an extra zero one way or the other?