Arlen Ward dot com

Over at Swans on Tea there was this gem today

The comments on the YouTube video got me thinking:

So if the density of Mercury is 13.5 g/cm³ and we assume Jesus weighed something around 80 kg, then he would be able to walk across a pool of Mercury with less than 6000 cm³ displacement. If his shoes are about the size of the ones I have on, he would sink up to his ankle.

Sometimes it is hard to get your mind around a number. The numbers that have been thrown around in the bailout and stimulus bills are those kinds of numbers. As Richard Feynman said:

There are 10¹¹ stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it’s only a hundred billion. It’s less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.

Every one has a hard time when we start working with orders of magnitude or log scales. There is the classic “Powers of Ten” movie that has been around for ages.

So here is a great visual representation of what a trillion dollars looks like. Go ahead and click through, it is mind boggling. That’s $1,000,000,000,000.00, a number that has been reached in not only bailout totals, but also in the stimulus bill totals. So we aren’t even talking about just one trillion. I hope nobody thinks this is real money.

And it isn’t just the current federal administration that is spending like drunken sailors, because here is a graphic that compares the bailout money from Bush’s last months in office to other large spending programs, all in adjusted 2008 dollars, so we are comparing apples to apples. And the numbers come from this.

This year I have been attending the opera, attending the opening night for both Madama Butterfly and The Pearl Fishers for Opera Colorado. And while the opera is entertaining, mostly it just gives me an excuse to wear my kilt.

You’ll notice I’m the only guy in this picture. That’s because my friend Neil faked two weeks of pneumonia in order to get out of it. But don’t ask him, he still claims it was legit.

As an added bonus, and because I have done this in a past life, and because it is also set to opera, I give you a production of VDOT Opera:

I know this blog has become a never ending stream of videos and comics lately, but this is too good to share. Maybe it rings true to me these days because I just recently added myself to the ranks of the iPhone users.

I love my phone. I hear that admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery, but if anyone wants to tell me their favorite iPhone app in the comments, I wouldn’t mind!

The latest XKCD comic hits on one of my favorite subjects. I am sharing it with you now. These two statements are correlated.