Gretchen Jones

Sometime around a child’s third birthday most kids learn to count to three and beyond. Before that one and two are it. By the end of grade school they can usually count to whatever number they are inspired to count to. By senior year in High School they’ve pretty much given up counting past two for most things because, really who wants to be the third wheel?

So when I saw a recent notice (thank you Cory Doctorow) that someone was floating a petition around the idea of using the prefix “hella” as a new indicator for this size number: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (that would be 10^27 if you’re really wondering) I shook my head - too many comma’s.  If you’ve read this blog for very long you probably have an idea where I stand on THOSE.

I understand the math guys who feel compelled to communicate the relative size of something like distance between our sun and oh, say the third star to the left of Jupiter’s fifth moon on December 12, 2012 as seen through Hubble’s squishendy splurch telescope.

I even understand the OCD guys who have to have a name for everything like the uvula, and paraphiltrum  {blog author makes squishy doubtfilled twisty face where philtrum is definitely out of square expressing satirical disbelief}

But really, for the rest of us?  Not critically important to know.

It’s just another number we’ll never see on the family truckster’s odometer.  Because let’s face it - they haven’t made trucksters that would go over 100k since 1963.

On the other hand, it would be easy to make the top Hellion seller’s list and that would be quite good. Easy to get your word count in under the top limit of 65 hellion.

A hellion dollar contract for your novel would result in a commission of about $ 250000000000000000000000000.00 give or take a few pennies assuming a commission rate of 25% which I think would be quite reasonable if the Agent sold a book for that much.

Something like a quarter hella I think. Maybe 2500 yotta? or .25 Octillion maybe (if Octillion exists, the one before it is Septillion so I’m guessing here and no you don’t want to see the condition of my check register…it is sad.)  And I don’t even want to think about how much tax you’d have to pay on that.  I guess the good news there is you’d only have to pay social security tax on the first $90K or so.  But that one sale would wipe out the budget deficit so I guess it’s not such a bad thing really, then the guys in Washington would have to yammer about something else.

The point is that in the context of scale a number that big to most of us is just a jillion, a gazillion, a mmmph, or gobs. Frankly, it’s more than a handful which in the wise words of my now graying former teenage guy compadres is just ” a waste”.

Come to think of it, wouldn’t it be entertaining to watch the look on the teller’s face as she tried to figure out how to key in a number that exceeds the bank computer systems capacity?

Scientific notation to balance my checkbook? Definitely a hella long shot.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010 at 11:50 pm and is filed under Foolishness, Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.