The song "I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke" (or whatever it's called) is on the TV airwaves again in a new commercial, although it's been made more cool with the addition of young, hip people who rap and stuff.

This got me thinking about the line "I'd like to buy the world a Coke." What if I could buy the world a Coke? We can take this one of two ways. First, we can say that I'll buy a can of Coke for everyone in the entire world. As I write this, the Census Bureau estimates that's 6,461,035,458 people. Now I don't buy Coke by the can in stores, but let's say I had a vending machine that dispensed billions of Cokes. I am familiar with one vending machine that sells them for US$0.60 apiece (I know, it was only $0.50 back in my day). Some simple math tells us that it would set me back $3,876,621,274.80 to perform this service for the world.

Now, who would be able to do such a thing? Thanks to Wikipedia's list of billionaires, we know that the world's 148 richest people could shell out the $3.8 billion required. If they were really cheap, they could split it between them and spend only $26,193,386.99 apiece. And when you think about it, that really isn't too much, is it?

Second, we could take it more literally. We could buy the world (one entity) a Coke (one Coke). Now let's be generous -- I can afford this one -- and say we're buying a 2-liter bottle of the stuff. I don't really know how much a 2-liter costs either, but I've seen 2-liter bottles of Pepsi for sale for $0.99, so maybe someone, somewhere, sells Coke at the same price. So, if I split the 2-liter bottle among the world's 6,461,035,458 people, they'll each get 0.00000000031 L, which isn't very much (about 0.3 nL -- nanoliters, of course), and is probably in fact to small to be seen by the human eye. That works out to a cost of about $0.00000000015 per person. Or I could just shell it out myself.

Man, I need a life.

The other day I started feeling sick. You know that terrible feeling when a real bad one's coming on. Yesterday it was a nose game. Today it's got my throat and my voice has been weakening all day. I'm actually kind of excited, because I've never lost my voice before, and it would give me an excuse not to talk to anyone. Saying more than a few words ends up hurting my throat, but being able to do Bill Clinton impressions makes it worthwhile.

Vertical... farming? Traditional farming takes up a lot of land, so apparently some people think that skyscraper-style farms would be a good idea. And maybe they would be. It's important, they say, for us to eschew "horizontal farming" methods. "If we do not, then in just another 50 years, 3 billion people will surely go hungry, and the world will be a very unpleasant place in which to live." (As if it isn't already.)