¶ Dollar Bills: $200 Billion One Dollar Bills Circling Around Earth (1)
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Human beings’ faulty number sense is being further confused by meaningless money magnitudes-- for instance, the combined war budgets of the United States, NATO, China, and Russia, which annually average about $200 billion. People talk about these cost magnitudes without any sensorial identity of relative significances. Dollar bills are approximately seven inches long by three inches wide. If we stack them and glue their edges together as with a pad of paper, we get approximately $200 in each one inch of stacking. If we keep adding to the pile it forms a column whose cross section is approximately three inches by seven inches. As we keep on adding to it, it gets too high to be stable, so we rotate it from the vertical to horizontal. It will begin to look like a beam: a seven-inch-by-three-inch beam. The lumber business has beam framings called four-by-eights. Finished by planing, this prime lumber size dresses out at three inches by seven inches, but it is still called four-by-eight, So our structural four-by-eight of laminated dollar bills, when extended to ten feet in length has the shape of a beam, such as you may see in
