2.000.000.000 (short scale)

Sometimes it's hard to be a guy. We can surf easily between Chomsky's home page, Teen Anal, Theravada Buddhism and the cheat-code for Grand Theft Auto with scarcely a hiccup of bad conscience; the Net has externalised (and so part-socialised and normalised) a mental routine that hitherto had kept itself hidden, as we naturally assumed such ugly, unmodulated key-changes would be read as a sign of our moral degeneracy. Only an idiot would say this is a good thing, however; society is woven together by the collective denial of our nature. The leap from savannah to settlement to city was much harder for us, as our mind-and-skill-sets were far less easily transferable. Had women not adapted so perfectly in a few million years, we would have cheerfully, and properly, taken another two billion over it.

Don Paterson in The Blind Love - A Book of Late Advice (Faber and Faber 2007)