 |
|
| Author |
How Much is a Trillion Replies |
rffrydr
Moderator
Joined: 30 Oct 2005
Posts: 16445
Location: Sunny California
|
 Posted: Sun Feb 15, 2009 1:43 pm Post subject: |
 |
|
Counting comes naturally...up to a fundamental point. For some it's more fundamental than others:
| Quote: | | ....His most recent work has confirmed that to develop a better understanding of numbers than that of a newborn baby, it is not necessary to be able to count with words. He collaborated with some Australian researchers to test aboriginal children in the country’s Northern Territory who were monolingual speakers of one of two languages, Warlpiri and Anindilyakwa, in which the only number words are one, two, few and many. (Words for numbers have generally arisen when and where people grow crops or keep herds; hunter-gatherer bands, who have no herds or other stores of wealth, need not keep track of surpluses, or balances of trade.) |
http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12847128
And economics can lead more advanced (negative) numbers:
| Quote: | | Such “irrational” numbers were bad enough, but what to make of negative ones? Although they had been widely employed since at least the mid-1500s, in particular to represent debts, many mathematicians refused to use them, claiming that quantities less than zero were an absurdity. A number “submits to be taken away from another number greater than itself but to attempt to take it away from a number less than itself is ridiculous,” wrote William Frend, a Cambridge mathematician, in 1796. |
http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12847118
_________________
Today is the Tomorrow you worried about Yesterday! |
|
| Back to top |
|
 |
rffrydr
Moderator
Joined: 30 Oct 2005
Posts: 16445
Location: Sunny California
|
| Posted: Wed Dec 03, 2008 2:19 pm Post subject: |
|
|
For the Bugs:
| Quote: | At the time of writing this article, the current US Federal Debt stands at $10.7 trillion. The sheer magnitude of that number is difficult to comprehend.
In order to illustrate just how large that number is, consider the following…
The size of a dollar bill is 6.6294 cm wide, by 15.5956 cm long, and 0.010922 cm in thickness. It would take approximately 96,721,648 dollar bills to make up one square kilometre.
The volume taken up by these dollar bills would be 12,068,253 cubic meters. This would fill over 90% of the largest building in the world, the Boeing Plant in Everett, Washington designed to assemble Boeing 747 planes.
If we were to cover an area with enough dollar bills equal to the current US debt it would have an area of 110,493 square kilometres which would nearly cover the entire state of Virginia!
When stacked, the number of dollar bills required to represent the US debt would be 1,167,243 km high. This is about 3 times the distance to the moon!
Laid end to end the dollar bills would measure 1,664,460,767 km which is longer than the distance of Saturn at its furthest point from the Sun. Uranus is 2.974 million kilometers away from the sun (about $19.1 trillion required).
Thought of in this context, we can truly say that the US debt is astronomical!
Best,
Mike Hewitt |
_________________
Today is the Tomorrow you worried about Yesterday! |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
rffrydr
Moderator
Joined: 30 Oct 2005
Posts: 16445
Location: Sunny California
|
| Posted: Fri Sep 19, 2008 10:09 pm Post subject: |
|
|
One more time 
_________________
Today is the Tomorrow you worried about Yesterday! |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Please log in to view without the ad banners |
|
|
|
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
|
Powered by phpBB
|
FAQ
Search
Memberlist
Usergroups
Statistics
Register
Profile
Log in to check your private messages
Log in
