Kirby703

local clown

  • she/her

speedrunner, tetris player, programmery human, absolute nerd

there is tetris on my youtube and twitch but I continue to not port content between them


GFD
@GFD
GFD
@GFD asked:

how many basketballs do you think there are

you could consider this a social experiment. the question is so ordinary and unassuming in terms of its subject and phrasing, yet at the same time so absurd and impossible to answer. i find the responses will say something about the responder, whether they try to consider the question seriously and what approach they try to take, or they figure it’s a joke and respond with some sort of joke in turn.

it’s also a question i do genuinely ponder on occasion, but not in terms of trying to quantify an actual correct answer. rather, trying to fathom just how many of this one type of object we’ve manufactured, out of the so many different types of things we have made, highlights just how great our impact on this world has been as a species: big enough that we cannot possibly keep track of it in any meaningful way. hence, why nobody can answer this question with authority.

but given how much i was cackling that evening at the mild chaos i unleashed on my timeline it’s probably most accurate to just consider this exercise like a prank of some sort. (i’m not gonna do something like this again, to be clear, it would definitely get old for most people the second time around already. there was already one person that did not answer this ask.) also really funny to me how, for a few people, this dumb question was the first ask they’d ever answered.

i wanted to share every response i got to this, but filling up the timeline with these all in a row would be even more annoying, so i’ll just link them here in chronological order with commentary:


Kirby703
@Kirby703

of the 10 000 000 - 1 000 000 602 basketballs in the world, I would guess... fewer than 1% are named, surely. it can't be that popular to name something that you're throwing into the pavement over and over when you could name a plush or something, but I dunno, kids are weird? ...maybe higher? 5%?

Cariad's source saying both "up to 25 million per year" and "8 million total" for America is bothersome. even its lower bound of 250 thousand per year is 8 million after only 32 years and it's not like America's in its peak basketball days or anything.

put me down for 300 000 basketballs with names. wait, do autographs count as giving a basketball a name, or is that too... fae? how many of those are there, anyway?


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @Kirby703's post:

The 8 million was also a yearly estimate, to be clear.

Do you count basketballs signed by being stamped at the factory? I mean, unironically, probably about 5% of basketballs are named “Wilson” anyway, because of Cast Away. I know I named one Wilson as a kid. Maybe several.