[pepsi_junkie]

Think about that, at $840M for 20 tons it means a tone of gold ... a TON ... is worth $42M. I don’t know if that’s correct but let’s assume it is. It really puts into context what a 1,000,000 dollars is. You can buy around 23 tons of gold for it. Congress throws around billions like it’s nothing and I think people have no real concept of how stunningly large amount of money $1,000,000 really is.

[Scrambler Bob]

$1,000,000 is a million

I think you mean $1,000,000,000 (a billion).

[Steely Tom]

I was lucky enough to go to a brand-new middle school in the late '60s. It had a long hall that connected the classrooms (in three "houses") to the common parts of the school (the gym, cafeteria, pool, etc).

Someone's dad who worked in the computer field printed out a million periods on fan-fold computer paper, and the principal had it put up along the wall; I'm sure it was printed by an IBM 1403 chain printer. A little quick math shows that at 120 columns per line and 60 lines per page, the printout would have been 126 feet long. A little quick photogrammetry on a Google Maps image of the school gives an estimate of 139 feet for the total length of the hall, so it would have worked.

Anyway, I've never forgotten that illustration of how big a million is, and am thankful for the school administration for having put it up back then.

By the way, I happen to remember that the entire school cost $2.2M in 1968 money.