How!          - 11/2/2009      <--Prev : Next-->



I am an ex-Bullies baby, and thoroughly enjoy receiving your news letter "from home". I did a little calculation a while ago regarding how high the stack of money would be if you piled it all up, only to find out it reached the sun and back several billion times. On the same principal, I did the following calculation:

At the last count, the Zimbabwean exchange rate to the US dollar was 30 trillion new dollars to one. The real exchange rate is obtained by adding back the thirteen zero's that had previously been loped off (another twelve have been loped off since), giving an exchange of 300 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 to one, or more commonly notated as 3 X 10 to the power of 26, or 300 septillion to one. I did a little exercise the other day, to see how fast I could count "notes" by hand. I used a deck of cards, and found I could count two cards, or "notes" per second. Using this as a base, and assuming one was counting one dollar bills, it would take 4.746 sextillion years to count out the money - that's without any sleep!! Using 100 dollar bills, and only counting for 12 hours per day, this would take a mere 95 quintillion years - to count out enough for US$1. Imagine if you need to count out two dollars worth.

How!

Best regards

Andrew Quick