Scientists and physicists estimate the number of atoms in the universe at 10 to the power of 80 — 10 followed by 80 zeros.
During the worst of Zimbabwe’s economic meltdown and hyperinflation, Zimbabwe’s highest money denominations were logged at 10 to the power of 25 — 10 followed by 25 zeros — or the equivalent of nearly one third of the number of atoms estimated in the universe.
h/t Ward
I wonder how the value of the paper and ink compare to it’s denomination?
Umm. Err — Oh Boy. Where on earth do you start with this one?
Stock tip. Invest in wheelbarrow stocks and stock wheelbarrows.
Just a hunch.
Guaranteed half your readers won’t get it.
Another AP idiot.
oh, it’s just a number printed on some paper, I wonder if someone told Bob that soon he will either have to make the notes longer, make the print microscopic, or use notation.
Probably never happen here, I heard there are some adults in Congress, and a majority gov’t in Canada is coming. Probably.
Get a brain morans!
Is there a special math class in the School of Jouralista?
What are you willing to wager to back that guarantee? Alex.
That one should be in its own glass case in the Journalism Hall of Fame.
syncro @ 10.42, that is good advice. It is not as if this would be the first time wheelbarrows were used to go buy lunch.
Syncro:
I’d wager large amounts of money, if there were a way to make it a fair contest. Unfortunately, as soon as one person posts an explanation/clarification, everyone else will say “yeah, I totally knew that!”.
Looking at your first comment, I thought you’d probably missed it. I’m still not sure that you haven’t.
ken(kulak)
My Grandfather ate raw eggs until he died at 78 not because he had to…he did it because during WWI in Belgium he got used to it. He stole from jhe sparrows to stay alive.
Alex
Other commenters here have tried to invite you into the eclectic bunch that is SDA.
You mostly act angry. Smarten up.
Ha ha, I got it. One third eh?
By the way, 10 to the power n is 10 followed by (n-1) zeroes (this is not the error being highlighted in bold).
For example, 10 squared is 100. That’s 10 followed by one zero.
Need I go on?
10 to the 25th power would be 10 followed by 24 zeroes.
Sorry sync, but I’ve yet to meet anyone here capable of making me angry. Smarten up.
No one got it at the Blaze blog. It looks like only a couple caught it here. The funniest thing on the other blog, is the doctor who got so carried away with trying to be a math genius, he overlooked such a glaring mistake.
Hey there math is hard Barbie Journo
10 to the power of 80 is a he!! of a lot more than three times bigger than 10 to the power of 25
example:
A) 10 to the power of 3
B) 10 to the power of 9
B is 3 times as much? Nope
10^3 = 1,000
10^9 = 1,000,000,000 a million times as much.
Peter- Not quite, but you’re on the right track.
There are two glaring mistakes. One involves simple division, the other involves exponential notation.
Guaranteed Alex didn’t get it, until his Mom broke out the finger puppets.
Alex @ 10:44 p.m. …
I bet you’re wrong, if Kate has 10 to the sixth power readers, I’ll bet that 10 to the fourth power will get it.
That’s exactly the same as if eight squared of the eight cubed MPs present in the U.K. parliament voted against the government, they would need an election.
This is why it’s a good thing that two squared out of three squared Canadians are sensible people and not progressives, or this country would be in a heap of trouble.
Thank goodness
Coach, I got it first time, read my comment again.
I said NOT the reason for the bold highlighting.
“Guaranteed half your readers won’t get it.”
Smug alert!
If you do a quick search, that’s actually the approximate number of hydrogen atoms in the universe. I suppose the margin of error has about 100 zeros. I suspect the number of atoms in the actual Zimbabwe trillion dollar bill would surprise most of us.
Mugabe was appointed as the chairman of the commitee for economic sustainability,or something like that,by the UN. Hmmm.
“I bet you’re wrong, if Kate has 10 to the sixth power readers, I’ll bet that 10 to the fourth power will get it. ”
Wow, harsh. I was willing to give ’em the benefit of the doubt – you’re being a wee bit overly pessimistic (although not necessarily wrong).
I don’t need to do math – I’m a trillionaire. I have a 100 trillion dollar bill from Zimbabwe. Of course, I only paid about six dollars for it…….
Can anyone tell me which is stupider the journolist that can’t do math or the physicist whose ego is so huge he says stupid things believing people are too ignorant to see through his bafflegab.
That’s okay, I didn’t get it either, but it’s best to be humble about your stupidity instead of getting all obnoxious and tetchy about it! Math, arithmetic, whatever is I think fascinating, but because I don’t get it I try to remain in awe. Too stunned to comment.
According to my grade 12 math, it would seem to me that 10 followed by 25 zeros would be 1/3 of 30 followed by 25 zeros. What am I missing.
For the record, this is known as “scientific notation”
This reminds me of a reporter at a press conference in the 80’s, scientists were talking about progress with SDI. One scientist remarked (and I can’t remember the exact numbers, but the concept is the same)”We need 1 times 10 to the 20th power watts to make a laser capable of shooting down a missile, and so far we have made lasers with a power of 1 times 10 to the 10th power watts.” At which time the reported cheerfully declared “We’re half way there!” Sigh.
Alex?
Let me fix that for you:
(the equivalent of nearly the number of atoms estimated in the universe)^^(one third)
And to think that when it was still Rhodesia it was the breadbasket of Africa. Of course it was whites running the country and political correctness meant they had to leave. Unforseen consequences as to what all the activists wanted and what the gutless political elites pandered to. White….bad. Black….good. Too many people out there with too much time on their hands.
To give a little scope – there are more atoms in a liter of water than 10 to the 25th.
Since they’re obviously drowning mathematically, someone should throw them a log().
∞² : Which year in Liberal Arts is Avogadro’s # usually covered? isn’t it …. grade 10 o 11 chem? so, it’s been awhile. Probably don’t need chem. to get into journalista school.
1 litre of dihydrogen monoxide = 1000 gm. of H20 x (18.015 grams/mole) = 55.5093 x avogadro’s # = 3.3428 x 10 “to the”25th
well it’s close.
So, not quite enough, that if we removed it from the oceans, they’d stop rising, and like I said, we’ll need more paper.
marc in calgary,
You forgot … 3 atoms per molecule.
When we lived in Rhodesia the currency was worth more than the Canadian dollar.
Fast forward 35 years and look what a racist Marxist gets you.
(I’ll let the rest of you argue over the math errors)
I noticed years ago. The more colorful the money, the less its worth.
Another thing to thank Trudopian socialism for.
JMO
Hey Alex 2 10:44, shouldn’t you bit a bit more concerned that the AP journalist and their layers of editors didn’t “get it”, rather than whether the commenters here do?
The only thing I’m confused about is this — how did Robert Mugabe live this long?
What I find unbelievable that none of the people who commented on this story never saw this absolutely idiotic display of innumeracy. Back in the days when people used slide rules no-one would have made that mistake (I still have several slide rules).
Innumeracy seems to be particularly prominent among lawyers and I was once having a discussion with a female lawyer who mentioned that they’d sent a difficult financial problem off to an accountant. I asked what the problem was and gave her the answer before she’d finished giving me the details — it was a simple percentage calculation. I wonder if the accountant who was given this “difficult financial problem” was able to keep a straight face when he submitted his bill. The look on her face when I gave her the results of a simple mental calculation was priceless.
Then I don’t have to go into looks of total confusion and terror I get from cashiers when I give them what seems to be a mystifying amount of cash for a purchase except it seems to magically result in my getting paper money back and emptying my pockets of excess change.
Everyone can get a feel for numbers — if I was able to figure out how to elucidate human emotions from facial expressions and body movements after switching from programming to medicine then surely the liberal arts types can learn some basic math. What I’ve been recommending to parents of kids who are having problems with math is to get mathematics textbooks published in the 1930’s or earlier as their kids seem to learn a lot more from reading such books than what currently passes as math education.
Robert Heinlein said it best: Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house.
Oops, posted too fast. Good one 2Sheds. Speaking of logs, one way to get an idea of peoples level of math skills is with the following joke.
On Noah’s ark there was a problem with the adders refusing to mate and eventually the problem made it’s way to Noah.
“Bring me some logs and nails” Noah commanded.
After his crew had scrounged up the necessary supplies Noah then said: “Build me a table of what ye have brought”.
After some furious sawing and hammering a table was completed. Noah grabbed each of the adders by the head and placed them on the table at which point frenzied serpentine coitus ensued.
As the amazed crewmen looked on, Noah’s comment was: “On a log table even adders can multiply”.
My results are that engineers are often hysterical with laughter (especially if they’ve been drinking beforehand) whereas the liberal art types ask about aphrodisiac properties of bark.
“If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is
only because they do not realize how complicated life is.”
— John von Neumann
Reading through the Blaze comment thread, I just thought it was funny that the first person to notice the powers-of-ten error used the handle “classical libertarian”. Heinlein (thanks for the quote, Loki, it takes me back – Lazarus Long in ‘Time Enough for Love’, right?) probably would’ve described himself the same way.
BTW, this doesn’t even qualify as a ‘mathematical error’. It’s not matrix algebra or third-order differential equations, it’s freaking arithmetic. I get the feeling that the author (and most of the commenters) aren’t regular readers of xkcd.
Alex >
“Guaranteed half your readers won’t get it.”
ROFL – idiocy to the power of 10.
Which half of SDA readers are you Alex, an all day every day reader or just a ½ a day?
I don’t understand the anger directed at Alex, he’s probably more or less right.
Which illustrates the bigger point, i.e. that a lot of people, regardless of political persuasion, are fairly easily misled with math, statistics, physics, etc.
(Cmp e.g. the sloppy CAGW reporting.)
Conclusion?
It’s not fair*.
Leftists are innumerate.
Is this a fair summary?
#20. Wretchard
“Professor Hanson ruefully remarked in his article that:
What strikes me is not that leftism does not work, but that when it is indulged and doesn’t work, its beneficiaries scream at the unfairness of it all—in the fashion that a theorist who claimed 2 plus 2 equals 5 blames the construct of mathematics because his equation is not true. Why don’t Germans just give Greeks the hundreds of billions of euros that they “owe” them?
The thing to remember is that VDH isn’t engaging in hyperbole or parody. Some people really do believe that if you push the ATM buttons hard enough, the money will actually spew out.”
“The End of Days”
http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2011/01/02/the-end-of-days/#comments
*H/T Dionky.
I guess this means that, adjusted for inflation, it takes 5 of these notes to buy a vuvuzela.