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How Much Is One Million?

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While watching the trailer for the upcoming film, Paper Clips, I was reminded of an experiment I performed back in high school. Mind you, my experiment didn’t have as much meaning or purpose as the project documented in the trailer, but it does illustrate yet another dimension of my geek personality.

We hear the term “million” thrown about constantly in our society, whether in relation to movie star salaries, box office grosses, corporate profits, corporate losses, television game shows, or potential lottery jackpots. In the computer industry, we talk about millions as if they’re nothing. Case in point: a 3½ inch floppy disk has 1.44MB (or approximately 1,509,949 bytes) of storage, yet floppy disks have all but been abandoned, simply because they don’t hold enough information. For example, my 5 megapixel (2,560 x 1,920 = 4,915,200 total pixels) Nikon Coolpix 5700 digital camera stores a full resolution image at “normal” JPEG compression in approximately 1MB of space, making floppy disks woefully inadequate for storing any more than a single photo.

Now, when I was back in high school, 1MB was still considered a lot of space. But how much is one million (ignoring the fact that 1MB is really 1,024 bytes x 1,024 bytes, or 1,048,576 total bytes)? I needed a way to truly appreciate the size and scope of this number, so I came up with my own experiment. What if I took my Casio calculator, entered 0 + + 1, and pressed the equals key one million times (which has the effect of adding 1 each time the key is pressed)? How long would that take? Would the equals key fail before I pressed it one million times? Would the battery last that long? I had to find out.

So, I entered the formula on a Monday morning before school started, placed the calculator on the top corner of my desk, and began pressing the equals key. It’s amazing to me how the human body can adapt to such unique scenarios, because it wasn’t very long into the first day that my hand almost instinctively began “twitching” up and down in an almost nervous woodpecker-like motion. I found that I could average approximately 10,000 presses per class, and I could do this with one hand while listening or writing with the other.

While walking between classes, I perfected a technique that allowed me to lightly grip the sides of the calculator with my thumb and ring fingers and “bounce” the equals key off of my index finger, all the time maintaining my arm in a normal walking position. It wasn’t long before teachers would ask what I was doing or check on my daily progress when I came to class. I’d even continue the experiment during lunch. And when I left school in the afternoon, I stored the number in memory and kept the calculator in my locker.

Let me tell you…one million is a lot. It ended up taking me about 2½ weeks of constant pressing to reach one million. There were days where I could do more than 10,000 during a class, and there were days when gym class would prevent progress for an entire hour. I confined my experiment to school days, so nothing was done over the weekend. Now, imagine paying someone $1,000,000 using a similar process. You would have to hand over one dollar bills at the rate of approximately 3 per second over the course of 2 to 2½ weeks! What if each press of the equals key enabled your digital camera to write one byte of information to its storage media? It would take the same amount of time to store one photo! Insane!

Of course, today, one million isn’t much at all. You probably can’t even retire on $1,000,000. And 1MB of storage is almost laughable. The new cool number is one billion (yes, make sure you hold your pinky finger to the corner of your mouth when you say it). With so many billionaires cropping up and multi-gigabyte computer storage at low prices, perhaps I need to re-run my experiment with one billion as the goal. But then, unless I can increase the speed of my finger or dedicate more time to my experiment, it would take me a little over 51 years to finish! Wow!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    October 03, 2004
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    October 03, 2004
    Thats a good blog entry.

    I guess the secret is not in doing ONE AT A TIME. :)

    Making money is exponential, adding memory to your system is exponential. So you've gotta figure out the fact that 1-100,000 takes X amount of time and that is the same time u gotta take to go from 100,000 to 1mil and then 1 mil to 1 bil.

    Then how come my paycheck ain't increasin' .. oh wait it's that war in iraq that I'm payin' for .. ok it makes sense now.
  • Anonymous
    October 03, 2004
    are you joking? you seriously pressed the equals key 1,000,000 times?
  • Anonymous
    October 03, 2004
    Hey

    I don't Believe you ? Should I ?

    Anyways I appreciate you have learnt of the the Most Valuable Lessons in Life and you Still Remember it.

    Everything is Important & Everyone is Important, No matter the Size.

    Little Drops of Water and Little Drops of Sand
    Make the Mighty Ocean and the Pleasant Land..

    Little Bits of Zeroes and Little Counts of One
    Together , They Make the Pretty Million and the Computer Run...
  • Anonymous
    October 03, 2004
    We need a distributed equals key.
  • Anonymous
    October 03, 2004
    Have you ever calculated how much is a billion seconds in years? If you haven't try and guess without attempting the actual computation. The result might surprise you.
  • Anonymous
    October 04, 2004
    Roughly ~40 years? I did that calculation in about 40 seconds.

  • Anonymous
    January 24, 2007
    Another analogy...A keystroke equals one byte of data (excluding any data taken up for formatting and the like). The computation for WPM is 5 keystrokes per word. I type around 50 words per minute. It would take me around 7 1/2 years of nonstop typing to fill a GB of data.