I Am Not a Number. But You Might Be.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Via Andrew Sullivan, Geoffrey Pullum talks today about the weirdness of all the long strings of numbers that infest our lives:

I have often stared at documents like gas bills and been amazed to see things like account numbers or other identification numbers as long as 18 or 20 digits. There are only about 7 × 109 people in the world. Some account numbers are so long you could give separate account numbers to every member of the population on a billion planets with populations like ours. Those numbers could record the addresses and ages and incomes of the customers instead of just being random digit strings. But we don’t do that. The information society that people get so worried about — the world in which The Government knows all your details and tracks everything you do — hasn’t arrived yet, and probably never will. We’re not that organized as a species. We waste too much time and too many of our computational resources keeping track of pointless random digit strings and being unable to relate them to each other.

This is an interesting misconception on a couple of levels. First, most long strings of numbers aren’t simply random. They encode information in various portions of the digits, and they usually (though not always!) do it for good reasons. One of the most common reasons is to make the numbers comprehensible to trained human beings. If the first two digits of a part number indicate that it’s a TV set, for example, that can make life a lot easier for a clerk who’s entering the order. People frequently write down part numbers incorrectly, and human-readable chunks that don’t match the English-language description can alert order-entry clerks that there’s a problem. This in turn saves a ton of time and trouble remediating bad product shipments. I can attest from personal experience that this ability to decipher chunks of long alphanumeric strings comes in handy in a million different ways.

(Another example: yesterday Marian and I bought a new refrigerator. It turns out that in the model numbers used at Sears, “3” means stainless steel and “2” means white. We were able to catch a mistake before it happened by knowing this and mentioning it to the sales person who was helping us.)

Second, the fact that these strings of digits are or aren’t random, and may or may not be longer than they need to be, has exactly zero effect on the government’s ability to track everything we do. It does not imply any lack of organization, nor does it make anyone’s job harder. The computational resources used to keep track of strings of digits is probably something like 0.0001% of the world’s computational resources, and believe me, the fact that IP addresses are long doesn’t slow down the NSA one bit. However, the fact that, in this case, they are largely random, slows them down a lot. There are times when we should praise randomness, and this is one of them.

WE'LL BE BLUNT:

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't find elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't find elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate