This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science.
Twenty-two thousand sounds like a huge number. It's happens to be number of eastern Pacific gray whales currently swimming off the coast of North America. It's certainly much larger than 140, the number of whales that aboriginal people of this area are allowed to hunt. And it's far, far bigger than zero, the population size that the whales were rapidly approaching in the mid 20^th century.
