Wish That I Knew What I Know Now...

When I was 9 I went with my parents on a trip to D.C. with the church youth group. We went to the Museum of Natural History and there was a machine that recorded the world's population by fractions of a second. I found this terrifying. As the numbers clicked by, babies were being born and people were jumping off buildings; people were sweating and smiling on hospital beds or in taxicabs while elsewhere in hospitals, machines flatlined and others gasped. I thought the counter-machine had a line into these activities somehow; that every tick of the number up or down indicated an actual event, and not a statistical probability.