Chessboards, Rice & Locusts

The fascinating world of numbers is mostly beyond me, especially in the field of mathematics. One of the kindest school report comments I ever had was from my maths teacher who accurately commented ‘Gimblett is not mathematically minded’. As you can well imagine, I lived in trepidation at the time when school reports, for the term gone by, were due to be delivered by our postman, and the full scale of my disastrous non learning skills were exposed in far more unkindly ways than the kind mathematics teacher. The numbers of multiplication or more accurately referred to as ‘exponential’ are very much in the forefront right at the moment with our COVID-19 pandemic.

The Chessboard and the grain of rice example has recently been regurgitated in the news and how the  ‘spread’ is demonstrated on the exponential game; Chessboard = 64 squares. Place one grain of rice in first square, two grains of rice in second square, four grains in third square –  keep doubling and when we get to the 64th square we will need – wait for it – I’ve got to get this right – 9,223,372,036,854775,808 grains of rice – that nine in front represents Quintillion by the way.

And whilst I was pondering in the last Yaraka newsletter about the multiplication of insect numbers here at the moment, it reminded me of an experience we went through when we lived out here in the 1990’s.  Back then we lived in a wonderful old homestead with a beautiful garden, a citrus orchard and an expanse of green lawns; an oasis in the usually dry brown surroundings.  However the year we are talking about was a year when good rains had produced wonderful growth and the countryside was an explosion of Mitchell and other grasses. Then out of nowhere, and as quick as a snap of the fingers, a huge swarm  of locusts arrived.  Huge doesn’t really describe the reality of the situation.

So I want to describe to you what we witnessed when we had this swarm/plague descend upon us.
Our mail box was eight kilometres from the Homestead  and on that particular day about to be described, I had gone to pick up the mail. I hadn’t travelled far from the Homestead in the trusty old Hilux before something different and unusual was on the dirt road in front of me – which I discovered to be a thick moving carpet of locusts crossing the track and in the air. I would imagine the death rate of locusts squashed by the tyres as I travelled to the mail box would have been in the millions. On the return trip I measured the width of this swarm. It was seven point eight kilometres wide – that was the width – just short of eight kilometres! And how long from start to finish was any body’s guess. When I got back from the homestead with the news that we were about to be attacked by this fast moving army, we took up a position to be able to watch the event.

Away from us, and down a slope about three hundred metres away, was our house dam with a nice covering of green between us and it. We didn’t have to wait too long before we made a sighting of movement heading our way. It reminded me of watching a wave role in toward the beach; there was some height  as the first wave of locusts flew/jumped above the chewing-everything-in-sight ground force below. They reached the netting fence around the homestead and there, within the beautiful, recently cut, straight swathed, immaculate and proudly maintained lawn, they arrived.

It was like watching a Walt Disney cartoon! One had to see it to believe it. This thick line  swarmed through the netting fence and there before our eyes we watched the grass disappear as the band moved through. What they left was bare dirt with veins of grass roots displayed on the surface, and this was only visible after the last of the locust army had moved through leaving a few stragglers behind.
How many I wonder?  It would, I believe, certainly have been in the billions, if not trillions, possibly quintillions. They came, they went, and destroyed everything in their path. We experienced an unforgettable memory.  A memory all evolving around a huge set of numbers.

I’m playing around with some more numbers at the moment and getting totally bamboozled by the number of noughts involved. For ease of my calculations I’ve decided to round off Australia’s population at 25 million. From what I can gather, the various stimulus packages being given out by Federal and State Governments will be about 2.5 billion, and I’m trying to divide the numbers to see how much every individual Australian will be ‘worth’ and how much our great great grandchildren will be paying back to keep us in the lifestyle that we have created for ourselves. This  stimulus package spending will largely enhance the economy of Asian countries who manufacture the goods that we can no longer do without.

I guess the bright side to this is that Harvey Norman and JB Hi Fi will do well, the tragic  side, many, many, small businesses will never ever open again.

As Donald Rumsfeld, the past US Secretary of Defence  once said, “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.”

And that quote, somehow, sums up the present situation rather well, I feel.