The conversations I’ve had with people over the last week about the Asian Tsunami disaster have all been notably short. We have trouble imagining its true scale, the number of victims, the extent of the devastation.

To put it into context, the current count is somewhere about 125,000 confirmed dead. If you were to meet those people, and talk individually to them for just one minute, it would take you over 2,000 hours or about three whole months.

Three months, twenty four hours a day, just spending one minute with each person. That’s only about enough to find out their name, where they lived and what they liked to do.

Of course, that might rise by another two-and-a-half solid weeks, if the toll gets to 150,000.

Or think of it another way, if all those people were laid out end to end, they’d stretch for about 130 miles. That’s the equivalent of 5 back to back marathons. It would take you about 20 hours to run that distance non-stop, assuming that were even possible.

Or yet another, it’s about the same number of words as there are in a John Grisham or Dan Brown novel.

I hope that helps. Disturbing, isn’t it?