RNS Quote of the Day: 10/03/08

This is what happens when you let mathematicians blog.

Well you’ll all have heard of the attempt to bail-out the US Banking sector to the tune of $700bn. Doesn’t look too big like that does it? It’s quick and easy to say and I typed it using six just characters.

But what does $700,000,000,000 actually look like? A US dollar bill is 66.294×155.956×0.10922mm and weighs 1g. So lets play around and see what that means if you have 7 with 11 zeros afterwards portraits of Washington. Well it would make for an interminable art gallery for a start. If you glanced at each portrait for a mere five seconds it would be nearly 111,000 years before you got to the cafe for much needed refreshments.

Or, if bored at looking at 700 billion George Washingtons, you just stacked them up on on top of each other you’d get a pile about 76,454 km tall. That’s about 47,000 miles or approximately a fifth of the distance to the moon.

Say you decide instead to go horizontal, and not vertical, it turns out a dollar bill is near as damn it 1/100 of a square metre so you’ve got 7 billion square metres or 2700 square miles of “tiling” available. That’s enough to do an area the size of the Palestinian territories and São Tomé and Príncipe (the second smallest country in Africa) with some left over.

But enough of this one and two dimensional frivolity. What’s all that wonga look like in a bloody big cubic block? Well, it’s a cubic block 91.6m on each side or near as damn it 300 ft wide, 300 ft deep and 300 ft high. That definitely is in the arena of the bloody gigantic.

If it ever comes time to stop playing with this cash and return it to the US tax-payer (it’s their money it is afterall) you’re gonna need some serious transportation because that quantity of cash would require 23197 8′x8′6″x40″ ISO containers. The World’s largest container ship, the M/V Emma Mærsk, can carry 7600 such containers. So you need to load her up a smidgen over 3 times. On dry land that would make for a stately procession of double stack freight cars about 100 miles long. Chugging along at a steady 33mph that could leave you waiting at a level-crossing for three hours which is a lot longer than it takes to glibly say, “700 billion dollars”.It’s all just a matter of perspective.

NickM at Counting Cats in Zanzibar blog

My most humble apologies to Nick. I just couldn’t find a way to neatly excerpt that.