Slow Friday: Random Thoughts

Storage Wars

I will be shocked if this show produces even the slightest bit of enjoyment for me in my lifetime. Even accounting for quantum uncertainty, I will say unequivocally it will be zero. Nonetheless, I'm forced to hear several commercials for it every day due to their radio advertising campaign. During their standard spot, the advertisement claims that every day over 10,000 abandoned storage units are sold to the highest bidder.

It's hard to have an intuition about large numbers which we can hardly understand. Compounded with the fact that the workings of the public storage market is far from a topic of interested, I would be very understanding if my intuition led me wrong here. However, doesn't this just seem like a ridiculous number?

Census.gov estimates that in 2010 there are 114,825,428 U.S. households. Of them, data suggest that 1/11 own storage units. That would imply that we have 10,438,675 storage units in the country. If 10,000 are auctioned off everyday, that would mean we see 3,650,000 sold off per year. This then accounts for 35% of the total storage units in the country. 35% of all storage units become abandoned/foreclosed upon? That seems a tad ridiculous, even for a country struggling with numerous economic problem. In the worst counties in the country we have a home foreclosure rate of less than 1%. Certainly homes rank much higher on one's priority list and face a far lesser chance of being unfunded, but still something seems fishy about this to me.

These estimations are rough at best. The 1/11 of households ratio could be slightly misleading. I assume it was calculated by dividing storage units by number of households, but it could just be the ratio of families owning at least one storage unit to total families. This would make the numbers more favorable, but I'm inclined to say BS on this one. Or is my intuition just flawed?


Black Holes

It's pretty obvious why physicists are in love with black holes. The public at large too tends to love things that are mysterious or those that offer all the interesting aspects of a hard science without all the hard work. Black holes in the popular science realm satisfy both of those categories. This said, perhaps part of their appeal comes from the human fascination with death?

We don't know what happens inside a black hole. We have lots of theories, but no consensus. All we know is that the physical world as we know it ends. The laws of physics breakdown. It's a completely different kind of place.

The event horizon appears to be a mundane thing. You can't see it. You can't measure it. When you pass through it, you won't even know it happened. However, once you do nobody on the other side can ever reach you. This is a poor explanation, but since I've started studying them it's a connection which is constantly in my mind.