While it is very nice to read about Microsoft’s free cloud service for research:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2010/11/18/democratizing-research-with-the-cloud.aspx

I couldn’t help noticing that their perspective on numbers are a bit peculiar.

The comparison image they use even fail to link to their sources, you need to type them yourself:

http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idb/worldpop.php

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/genbankstats.html

Link to original image in larger format:

http://blogs.technet.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer-Blogs-Components-WeblogFiles/00-00-00-80-54/8132.NCBI_2D00_lg.bmp

While I don’t know much about DNA base pairs, I thought the number of people worldwide was a bit of… Now I know more about the number of base pairs – by verifying the source…

This reminds me of the essay by Edward Tufte on NASA’s use of PowerPoint:
http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB&topic_id=1