Monday, May 18, 2009

I am one grain of rice...

Yesterday I went to an interesting exhibit called, "Of All The People In All The World: The Americas", downtown at the Harbourfront Centre. It basically uses grains of rice to represent different population statistics. One grain of rice = one person. They also have a cool website!

The first piles below show the number of people on the U.S. terror suspect list in 2003 vs. in 2008 (yikes).
These piles below show the people who bought "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" on the first day of release in the UK and U.S. vs the people who bought the Beatles single "Can't Buy Me Love" on the first day of release in the U.S.

Next shows the passengers whose flights were diverted to Canada on 9/11 vs the confirmed deaths of 9/11. And last, we have Martin Luther King delivering the "I Have A Dream" speech vs....

Barack Obama's Facebook supporters!

Very clever!

6 comments:

  1. I agree, very clever. They did some really interesting comparisons. That would be the hardest part for me--coming up with the comparisons to make.

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  2. I kinda think counting out those grains of rice is pretty tedious :) Wow!!!

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  3. very interesting...

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  4. Wow!! Very interesting to say the least!!!

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  5. They have a system where they weigh the rice to calculate the piles. Counting it all would just be insane since there are 879 million grains of rice used in the exhibit!!

    And the great this is that they donate the rice to food banks at the end.

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  6. Ah, good to know. I imagined someone actually counting them!!

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