[Rhodes22-list] Speaking of Reliable Sources (Political)

[Herb Parsons]

I had a math professor in college my freshman year. He made an offer to 
all of the students. If they would sequentially write all of the numbers 
beginning with 1, ending with 1,000,000,000 (one billion), he would give 
them $50.

Just to make himself clear, he said no cheating, no tricks on words, you 
must write 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 etc. all the way to 1,000,000,000

Some actually pulled out a paper and pen and began writing.

Then he broke the news to them. If you could write one number a second 
(pretty easy to do at first, but not so easy as you get to the bigger 
numbers), and wrote 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, you would finish in 
about 32 years.

Yeah, most of us don't understand the concept of 1,000,000,000.


Michael D. Weisner wrote:
> Herb,
>
> Yep, you are correct, it was posted complete with the error in calculation. 
> Nonsense?  It has been shown that when you're off by a factor 1,000 it is 
> much easier to propose economic solutions.  The "K-Error" refers to a 
> similar failure mode in the calculation of medication dosage.
>
> >From the esteemed Wikipedia 
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indefinite_and_fictitious_numbers):
> "Words ending in the sound "-illion", such as zillion, jillion, and 
> gazillion, are often used as fictitious names for an unspecified, large 
> number by analogy to names of large numbers such as million, billion and 
> trillion. Their size is dependent upon the context, but can typically be 
> considered large enough to be unfathomable by the average human mind."
>
> "These terms are often used as hyperbole or for comic effect, or in loose, 
> unconfined conversation to present an un-guessably large number. Since these 
> are undefined, they have no mathematical validity and no accepted order, 
> since none is necessarily larger or smaller than any of the others."
>
> Most folks have no idea what a billion bucks looks like let alone a 
> trillion.  Let's make it a gazillion and remove all semblance of meaning.
>
>
> Mike
> s/v Shanghai'd Summer ('81)
> Nissequogue River, NY
>
> From: "Herb Parsons" <hparsons at parsonsys.com>Sent: Thursday, October 02, 
> 2008 11:15 AM
>   
>> Didn't one of our esteemed regulars post this nonsense as some sort of
>> "plan"?
>>
>> http://www.snopes.com/politics/taxes/dividend.asp
>>
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