Something for a Sunday Morning

[Bruce Cohen]

A Billion !

Here's some thought provoking information -

The next time you hear a politician use the word "billion" in a casual manner, think about whether you want the "politicians" spending your tax money.

A billion is a difficult number to comprehend, but one advertising agency did a good job of putting that figure into some perspective in one of its releases.
a.. A billion seconds ago it was 1959.
b.. A billion minutes ago Jesus was alive.
c.. A billion hours ago our ancestors were living in the Stone Age.
d.. A billion days ago no-one walked on the earth on two feet.
e.. A billion dollars ago was only 8 hours and 20 minutes, at the rate our government is spending it.

While this thought is still fresh in our brain, let's take a look at New Orleans It's amazing what you can learn with some simple division ............

Louisiana Senator, Mary Landrieu (D), is presently asking the Congress for
$250 BILLION to rebuild New Orleans.

Interesting number, what does it mean?

a.. Well, if you are one of 484,674 residents of New Orleans (every man, woman, child), you each get $516, 528.

b.. Or, if you have one of the 188,251 homes in New Orleans, your home gets $1, 329,787.

c..Or, if you are a family of four, your family gets $2,066,012.

Washington, D.C......HELLO!!!..........Are all your calculators broken????

Bruce

[Jim Boyd]

Thanks for letting me know I'm 1 billion seconds old I think I'll move to New Orleans

[LCHIEN]

a billion seconds ago it was 1974 not 1959.
A billion hours ago it was 104 AD and Jesus had been dead for ~100 years,
I don't trust any of your other figures.
Does anyone besides me check these things?

[Stytooner]

Okay, Loring. On what date were those figures accurate?
I agree with Jim. I going to Bourbon Street.

[Bruce Cohen]

Hey Loring,

Right or wrong, it's still entaining, not "Rocket Science" , besides, being right all the time is boring.. You got to loosen up some.

Bruce

[LCHIEN]

Okay, Loring. On what date were those figures accurate?

An offset of +N years would tell me that the calculations were done 10 years ago. But one was 25 years off and the other 100 years off of relatively recent events. A billion hours (We were "living in the stone age") was ~114,000 years - Wikipedia says the stone age was from about 8,000 years to 120,000 years ago. That's a wide window, hard to miss.
A billion days ("no one walked upright") is 2.7 million years - according to Time-Life magazine we started walking 6 million years ago. an error of mroe than 3 million years.

OK, so I'm anal about facts and figures.

I agree with Jim. I going to Bourbon Street.

I'll drink to that!
P.s. Jim, BAD news, you're MUCH older than 1 billion seconds.

[just4funsies]

Keep the street... I'l just settle for the BOURBON!!

[Stick]

I love it! Only an engineer would actually take the time to verify the figures. or someone who thinks like an engineer. I did too, but only because I was born in 59.

[bigsteel15]

I love it! Only an engineer would actually take the time to verify the figures. or someone who thinks like an engineer. I did too, but only because I was born in 59.

Let's see some more engineer bashing.
LOL

[Wood_workur]

Loring-

According to my calculations, 1 billion seconds ago is

31 years
8 months
7 days
23 hours
14 minutes
52 seconds

Give or take maybe 10 seconds (for rounding numbers to the nearest billionth), but I did allow for leap years in my calculations (each year was calculated as 365.25 days)

[Bruce Cohen]

Loring and Alex,

Thanks for the corrections, and making me look like the horses A** that I mostly am .

I wish I had the time and math ability to have seen the error of my ways, mea culpa, mea culpa.

After all, I'm only a graphic designer and as we all know, graphics people suck at math, typing, spelling and just about everything else that requires the use of our right, or is it left side of our pea sized brains. Maybe that's why nothing I build has a right angle??

It's all in the visual!!!

Thanks again, I'll sit in the corner with a dunce cap on for at least the rest of the day.

And I still think you guys have WAY TOO much time oh your hands!

Bruce

[leehljp]

Sorry Loring! Bruce is more accurate in government count, no matter which government or country! I have a feeling that if Will Rogers were around he could make a good comment about that!

[jdschulteis]

[. . .]
It's all in the visual!!!
[. . .]

Visualize a little square, with sides of 1/16 inch.
Visualize a big square, with sides of 165 feet.
It would take 1,003,622,400 of the little squares to cover the big square.
It's hard to comprehend a billion visually.

Now I must get back to work on my "Billion Pixel Homepage" . . .

[Rounder]

My wife is representing an engineer in a dissolution of marriage case. Now I see why she gets so frustrated when she tries to explain something to him. Egineers are taught that 2 + 2 = 4. Lawyers are taught 2 + 2 = whatever we want it to be.

[LCHIEN]

Hey, we're engineers. We're checkin' facts and takin' names.

I might add, we're used to big numbers.
To me, a billion bytes (a gigabyte) is merely 1/1000th of a terabyte.

An ampere is 602 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 electrons per second.

know any other big numbers?

I'm not really impressed if you take 1 billion seconds down to years, hours, minutes seconds etc, that's useless detail. I only need accuracy of somewhere in the range of 1-10%, we typically build in safety margins of 3X or more. But I need to know the practical amount. We do measure with great precision when the relative numbers are small. We measure engine components with .001" accuracy, but do not for example measure the length of a car to thousands of an inch, it's simply not practical.