How Do You Measure Kindness and Niceness?

This week, Go Figure sinks – without trace probably – into the weird world of trying to count. 1,2,3 and all that. How hard can it be? That’s our point. To count in the real world can be to flail in custard especially, as in these examples, when trying to count stuff that’s missing, or lost, or didn’t happen.

Such as? Here are attempts, past and present, somewhere between madness and genius, to try to count the more slippery stuff. They include congestion (cars not noses), lost money, fish and, with wonderful topicality, wasteful spending.

See what you think of the ingenuity of each, then test your own powers of invention on our counting challenge. But beware, one of the examples below is a hoax.

1. COUNTING LOST THINGS

Crows in New York State were trained to use a slot machine. They learnt to deposit coins in exchange for peanuts. The inventor, Joshua Klein, believes corvid intelligence is underestimated and could be put to human use. One idea was to use the device to count or at least estimate – and maybe recover – the quantity of lost change lying around. But would the crows find only money lost, or also learn to steal? Claims about the crows subsequently became the subject of bitter argument.

Go Figure rating: Barking mad. There must be an easier way.

2. COUNTING LOST TIME

A bloke – most likely a bloke in, let’s say a white Focus for anonymity – was employed to drive around making sure that if anyone overtook him, he overtook someone else in return. This was known as the “Floating Car”. It was used to try to calculate congestion on the roads. At a speed at which as many cars were slower as were faster, the car would be travelling at roughly a median speed. If congestion typically slows the speed of a typical car, and if we have a sense of how long the journey should take with traffic running freely, then the journey time of the Floating Car would give one rough measure of time lost to congestion.

Go Figure rating: Weird but, in a time before real-time traffic sensors embedded in the road, the solution has a curiously British practicality about it.

3. COUNTING RARE CREATURES

This runs into the problem of co-operation. They don’t fill in census forms and don’t stay still. And if they are rare, how do you find them to count them?