Napalm and Silly Putty

GOT ANY MORE LEAVES IN THAT STALL?

Recently I came across a statistic published by the Population Reference Bureau in Washington. It stated that as of 1995 the number of people who had lived on earth was 105,472,380,169. The figure was based on the assumption that “the first two people” had emerged in 50,000 B.C. So I did a little arithmetic of my own, and I’ve concluded that as of 1995 there had been over 987 trillion bowel movements. I was very conservative: I assumed a mere thirty-year life span and only six bowel movements per week. Still, it means that at this point there have been almost 1 quadrillion human bowel movements and most of them occurred before people had anything to read. These are the kinds of thoughts that kept me from moving quickly up the corporate ladder.