Yes, I believe the chow mein from Wednesday did me in on Thursday – I was pretty much a MSG blob. I would not say that I am any less blobbish today, but perhaps there is more energy in my blobhood today. Summer and I have already had a go round about who is going to go and get her clothes – and I want you to know I sat my sofa. I did not even say, “Your legs are younger than mine.” I just sent the psychic vibes that yes, indeedy, I would let her go through on her threat to go to school naked.

This morning I found an email from Der Bingle about just how much a trillion is. If this were hands on math in first grade, kids would need more than a few colored marbles.

I came across this and thought you would enjoy it:

A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation that yields a sense of the size of the trillion dollars.  It’s one thing to juggle exponents; it’s another to conceptualize how much a trillion really is.

A stack of 4 bills is 0.5 millimeters thick, so ten bills are 1.25 mm thick.  Let’s round down to 1.2 mm for a stack of ten bills.

Therefore, a trillion dollars is ten billion (10 to the 10) $100 dollar bills, corresponding to a stack of bills 1200 km or 740 miles high!  If the bills were $1 bills, there would be10 to the 12 (a trillion) of them, and they’d form a stack 74,000 miles high, or 30% the distance to the Moon!

Suppose the bills were joined end-to-end.  Dollar bills are about 6 inches or 15 cm long, so 10 billion $100 dollar bills would form a belt 1.5 x 106  (1.5 million) km long.  That’s about 900,000 miles long, almost four times the Earth-Moon distance.

And if you string a trillion $1 bills end-to-end, you’d get a belt o’ bills a hundred times longer than that, or about 90 million miles.  You’re past Mars’s orbit and entering the asteroid belt going away from the Sun, and in the other direction, you’ve about reached the Sun!