How tall is Jon Lee Anderson?

The second best thing about this story (from Tom Scocca) is that Anderson spells “Tweets” with a capital T.

But the best thing is that Scocca is numerate—he compares numbers on the logarithmic scale:

Reminding Lake that he only had 169 Twitter followers was the saddest gambit of all. Jon Lee Anderson has 17,866 followers. And Kim Kardashian has, as I write this, 17,489,892 followers. That is: Jon Lee Anderson is 1/1,000 as important on Twitter, by his own standard, as Kim Kardashian. He is 10 times closer to Mitch Lake than he is to Kim Kardashian.

How often do we see a popular journalist who understands orders of magnitude? Good job, Tom Scocca!

P.S. Based on his “little twerp” comment, I also wonder if Anderson suffers from tall person syndrome—that’s the problem that some people of above-average height have, that they think they’re more important than other people because they literally look down on them. Don’t get me wrong—I have lots of tall friends who are completely reasonable people (I’m of average height myself)—but every once in awhile I see this sort of thing, and it makes me wonder. This is just speculation, of course. For all I know, Anderson is 4 feet tall.

P.P.S. This is all fun, but I’m not trying slam Anderson. By all accounts, he’s a hard worker, and he probably just had a bad day. People tweet (or should I say, Tweet) all sorts of things without thinking. On the twitter feed, Anderson hasn’t been very gracious in his follow-up, but, hey, nobody’s perfect.