Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Things You Need to Know About the World

by Vaclav Smil

Facebook—that purveyor of constant selfies—had a market capitalization of almost $575 billion, nearly three times more than Toyota, the world’s premier maker of passenger cars. And SAP, Europe’s largest software provider, was worth about 60 percent more than Airbus, Europe’s largest maker of jetliners.

Take Facebook, which at the end of 2019 had about 43,000 employees versus the 370,000 or so that Toyota had during the 2019 fiscal year.

Edison later recalled. “I adjusted the reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly. I was never so taken aback in my life. Everybody was astonished. I was always afraid of things that worked the first time.”

outside the microchip-dominated world, innovation simply does not obey Moore’s Law, proceeding at rates that are lower by an order of magnitude.

Shakespeare’s plays and poems in their entirety amount to 5 megabytes, the equivalent of just a single high-resolution photograph,

1.7 megabytes of data is generated every second for every one of the world’s nearly 8 billion people.