The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #70594 Message #1208007
Posted By: Don Firth
15-Jun-04 - 04:09 PM
Thread Name: BS: Well, looky here... (Iraqi WMDs)
Subject: RE: BS: Well, looky here...
Picking a fairly sizable nit:
Lemme see, now. Covering three million documents. That's quite a daunting task.
Let us assume that each document is no longer than one typewritten page, although many documents, particularly government or academic documents can run many pages, sometimes up to book length. Nevertheless, let us assume one page per document. Let us further assume that each page contains no more than 250 words. If one types single space with one inch margins on a normal 8 ½ by 11 inch letter size sheet using one of the common fonts, 500 or more words per page is not unusual, but let's be generous and assume no more than 250 words per page. The average person (no dyslexia or anything like that) manages to read an average of about 250 words per minute, therefore it follows that the average person could read one of these documents per minute.
At that rate, 3,000,000 documents would obviously take a total of 3,000,000 minutes to read. That's 60 documents per hour; 1,440 documents per day ; 10,080 documents per week; 524,160 documents per year. We find that it would take 5 years, 8 months, 3 weeks and some change to cover all those documents.
And this assumes that our intrepid student takes no time out to eat, sleep, go to the bathroom, or take notes. He or she would be pretty gaunt and hollow-eyed by then, n'est-ce pas?
'Course documents in Arabic might not take quite that long to read.
Shall we get real?
Don Firth