原创 Take a moment to pause and ponder this...

There are some things that keep on going around the Internet. Most of the time, the reason they keep circling is because they are thought-provoking and well worth taking a few moments to pause and ponder...

As an example, my good friend Alan Freedman just emailed me a self-running PowerPoint presentation that I've seen many times before, but that still makes me take a moment to sit back and contemplate just how lucky I really am.

This presentation (which you can see by clicking here) involves a mixture of music and images and text, and starts off by saying:

If you could fit the entire population of the world into a village consisting of 100 people, maintaining the proportions of all of the people living on the Earth, that village would consist of:

* 57 Asians
* 21 Europeans
* 14 Americans (North, Central, and South)
* 8 Africans
The next slide follows by saying:

There would be:

* 52 Women and 48 Men
* 30 Caucasians and 70 non-Caucasians
* 30 Christians and 70 non-Christians
* 89 Heterosexuals and 11 Homosexuals
And so it goes...

Now I don't know how long ago this was created – I remember first seeing it years (and years?) ago – so I'm sure that the various proportions have changed to some extent. For example, the world's population, which was 3 billion in 1960 (three years after I was born), had grown to 4 billion by 1974, 5 billion by 1986, 6 billion by 1999, and will reach 7 billion in 2012. I'm sure that the relative magnitudes of things like Women versus Men have changed slightly over time, but the underlying messages remains valid...

If you are reading this column, you obviously have access to a computer and, of course, you can read, which already means you are doing pretty good compared to a lot of people on the planet.

So, all I wanted to say was that, as we are poised to enter the holiday season, let's take a moment to pause for thought, and to give thanks to whoever it is that is in charge of the multiuniverse that we have ended up as fortunate as we have...