Wednesday, June 23, 2004
The MegaPenny Project
by kokogiak media
Visualizing huge numbers can be very difficult. People regularly talk about millions of miles, billions of bytes, or trillions of dollars, yet it's still hard to grasp just how much a 'billion' really is. The MegaPenny Project aims to help by taking one small everyday item, the U.S. penny, and building on that to answer the question: 'What would a billion (or a trillion) pennies look like?'
All the following pages have tables at the bottom, listing things such as the value of the pennies, size of the pile, weight, and area (if laid flat). All weights and measurements are U.S. standards, not metric.
I found this site oddly absorbing. We talk about large numbers at work a lot... but when we say that one of our competitors has assests worth almost a trillion dollars, that number really isn't very... real. The MegaPenny project is trying to help.
Read more...
Visualizing huge numbers can be very difficult. People regularly talk about millions of miles, billions of bytes, or trillions of dollars, yet it's still hard to grasp just how much a 'billion' really is. The MegaPenny Project aims to help by taking one small everyday item, the U.S. penny, and building on that to answer the question: 'What would a billion (or a trillion) pennies look like?'
All the following pages have tables at the bottom, listing things such as the value of the pennies, size of the pile, weight, and area (if laid flat). All weights and measurements are U.S. standards, not metric.
I found this site oddly absorbing. We talk about large numbers at work a lot... but when we say that one of our competitors has assests worth almost a trillion dollars, that number really isn't very... real. The MegaPenny project is trying to help.
Read more...
