[math-fun] blood

Various sites claim our body creates (and destroys) about 2 million erythrocytes/sec. Yesterday, I had a kid compute the correction increment required for his growth. I think we overshot by a factor of 2 by using a (presumably adult) count of 2*10^13, getting about 63000/sec. This roughly coincides with the total of vertebrate species, all but 25 of which have erythrocytes! Do see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channichthyidae. It's enough to warm the subzero heart of a Creationist. --rwg