Comment by recallingmemory
3 days ago
Absolutely, not to mention the difficulty people have in grasping the difference between a billion and a trillion.
3 days ago
Absolutely, not to mention the difficulty people have in grasping the difference between a billion and a trillion.
Always use the same unit in comparisons.
Instead of "1.6 trillion vs 6.4 billion" write "1600 billion vs 6.4 billion"!
I've remembered the fact that a million seconds is ~11 days and a billion seconds is ~32 years since I was a kid. Still feels pretty ridiculous as an adult, no-one who didn't know it has even guessed close (and some who try to work it out were way off).
I just had to google what a trillion is in years, and the answer made me realise I don't instinctively understand the relationship between a billion and a trillion either!
Each "-illion" is 1000x bigger than the previous one.
If you have some cubes 1 cm on a side (about the size of a sugar cube), you can make a bigger cube out of them with 10 little cubes along each edge. Now you have 1 big cube made from 1000 smaller cubes.
Your bigger cube is now 10cm x 10cm x 10 cm. Easy enough to pick up in one hand.
Now do it again. Make a bigger cube with 10 of those cubes along each edge. Now you have a cube 1 meter on each side. Too big to pick up by hand but it would still fit in the back of a pickup truck.
This 1-meter cube contains 1 million sugar cubes.
Do it again: With 1000 of the previous cubes, make a cube 10 meters on a side. This cube is the size of a 3-story house, and it contains 1 billion sugar cubes.
Now do it once more: With the house-sized cubes, make a 10x10x10. Now the cube is about the size of a football stadium. It contains 1 trillion sugar cubes.
Take 4 of these stadiums, call each sugar cube $1, and you have the market cap of Nvidia.
[Note: This is US usage. In older UK English, some of the "-illion" words mean different things than they do here.]
What’s the difference between a million and a billion? A billion.
"You have a million dollars? Damn man you a regular Elon Musk or something"