One of the main two downsides of having a mole (unit of measurement) of moles (animal) on earth is that it would “really mess up [Randall Monroe’s] iNaturalist wildlife sighting stats.” Watch the full video here. https://youtu.be/lLlwvmu1ZeA?si=PeTUtiEaUXn9zYj5
I do hope that these subtle references to iNaturalist increase interest from the nerds who follow XKCD comics and videos. Maybe some will become desperately needed identifiers.
What species of mole? What eagle? What deer?
Even what poison ivy?(radicans or rydbergii).
45 billion observations may seem like a lot, but if every human on the planet made 6 observations we would bypass that mark. Unfortunately, only 1 in 1000 of the population has ever made an Inat account.
Yeah, we need identifiers badly, maybe we will get a mole of them!
Randall Monroe starts off by rattling through a bunch of very questionable approximations. And then he gets to my favorite line in the video:
if anyone asks, I did not tell you it was ok to do math like this.
Still, that is a whole lot! My guess would’ve been something way smaller. Unless this is also a guess…
Randy has been making questionable assumptions like that in XKCD for as long as he’s been doing XKCD, but as it’s only a semi-serious comic I tend to let it slide.
Yes, I’m a fan of XKCD and I’ve read his first What If? book, so I’m familiar with the style. It was just perfect comedic timing when I started thinking, “wait, what? back up there,” that he hit me with that disclaimer. 
I actually think that video would make a great ice-breaker exercise for teachers to present to their class. Transcribe all the claims in the video. Can you fact-check this? Is the math right? Is that conclusion reasonable? Etc.
The Great Axe, Great Tree what if entry is one that kinda triggered me as I know Randy (not well, but he’s married to a classmate of mine and we used to hang to together periodically in grad school), and I know that at the time he didn’t have a great deal of international experience, so his assumptions about axe prevalence were wildly off.
It’s completely a nit-picky point, but axes are primarily a temperate and cold climate tool. not that they aren’t used in other areas, but in those other areas the tool of choice is generally something more like a machete, parang, or other large knife type thing. As a result the axe size estimate in that particular what if is way, way off.
It doesn’t really matter though as it can be assumed that in this case it’s more about the job the tool does than the specific detail of the tool.
That’s just one mole.
World population estimates seem to vary quite a bit, mostly in the 8.0 to 8.3 billion range. On August 15th iNaturalist had more than 9 million accounts, so, assuming all those accounts were created by different people (both ‘different’ and ‘people’ are debatable), roughly 1 in 900 people, globally, have created an iNat account.
However, lots of accounts have been created by bots, some people have created multiple accounts. A little over 3.8 million accounts have created at least one observation, which is a more relevant number. There’s also the problem of accounting for people who created an iNat account but since then have died. Active users in the last 30 days has been hovering around 400 thousand.
So: roughly 1 in 2,200 people alive today have made an iNat observation at some time in the past 17 years, and roughly 1 in 20,500 people have used iNat in the past month. The first number is significantly more uncertain than the latter.
See https://www.inaturalist.org/stats for iNat numbers.
Global population estimates: UN, US Census Bureau, various others.
That seems high to me. I wouldn’t have expected such uptake. (Not disagreeing with you)
From an ‘average South African’ see below ;~))
Statistics like that conceal a lot of variation. For the town I live in, it implies the number of iNat users here in the last month would have been less than 1, when I know there are at least half a dozen of us. If you divide the US population (340 million) by the number of people who have made an observation in the US in the past month (148 thousand), then about 1 in 2,300 people in the US have made an observation in the last month. But if you do the same for China (pop. 1.408 billion, 2.2 thousand observers), about 1 in 640,000 people in China have made an observation in the last month. For South Africa (pop. 63 million, 3.2 thousand observers) it’s pretty close to the average at about 1 in 19,700.
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