Quick maths behind the ice bucket challenge...

Despite the number of psychology books that I read, sometimes I find human behavior is indeed quite difficult to understand. For example, the ice bucket challenge that went viral.

I know this thing is here for a good reason: to raise the awareness of ALS (Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). But honestly, how many people who tried to freeze their brains by throwing ice water over their heads bother to know what does ALS stand for?


But I am not here to discuss whether it's stupid or smart to do the challenge. I am here to do some simple maths:


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Each person in the ice bucket challenge nominates 3 other people to do the same within the next 24 hours. So the number of people pouring ice water grows 3 times every day.

• Assume there are 7 billion people in the world, in 21.27 days the entire population would have poured ice water once.

• Assume only the people living in developed countries have access to clean water, and 10% of them did the challenge, using a 20 cm X 30 cm X 40 cm ice bucket. We could have wasted 2.4 million cubic meter of water (or 960 Olympic-sized swimming pools), in a little more than 2 weeks.

OK. This is all I want to say. Judge it yourself : P