I was reading CNN.com this morning and couldn't help but notice this story about our national debt and how the National Debt Clock at Times Square in New York City ran out of digits.
Just for the sake of silliness I decided to take that snapshot in time - exact time not reported on the site but I'm sure can easily be extrapolated from the rate at which the debt is growing - and do some math. I'm a verified nerd and have two university degrees to prove it so I reserve my right to do this.
According to this website, the thickness of a standard US dollar bill is 0.010922 cm. If our country was to pay off the national debt in one dollar bills, the briefcase containing those dollar bills would have to be 110,854,422,000 cm long or 688,817.44 miles long.
As fate would have it, the circumference of our planet (that'd be Earth for most of us) is roughly 24,901.55 miles along the equator. This would mean the stack of one dollar bills needed to pay the national debt, if lined along the equator, would transverse our planet 27.66 times.
Keep in mind that number's growing constantly so it's going to be a much larger number as time marches on.
Aren't you proud to be an American?
In more exciting news I got bumped up to Lane 2 in swimming. Apparently this whole Total Immersion Swimming is really working out well!
1 comment:
Michael Phelps, watch out, here comes Jim! :)
Good luck with your marathons these next couple of weekends.
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