Exponents

Quick. How many zeroes in a trillion? If you said 12 you're right. Ten to the twelfth. I have now lived long enough to read a NYT headline that proclaims:

Congress Races to Pass $2 Trillion Aid Bill as Virus Shakes Society

Most people can write a million out in numbers. Six zeroes. Ten to the sixth. I started looking at the almanac when I was a kid in the 50s and absolutely marveled at the fact that Eisenhower's salary was $100,000 a year. Yes, that's right, $100,000. Ten to the fifth.

My salary at my last two jobs, the last of which ended in 2011, finally exceeded $100,000. I was chuffed that now in the 21st-century I was making more than Eisenhower did as president in the '50s. Mission accomplished.

We know that amounts of money are relative to the era. But I was amazed to read in a book review that President Jackson's budget for removing the Indians from their east of the Mississippi land ballooned way past the expected $500,000 (5 to the fifth) to $75 million. Talk about cost overrun. The author of 'Unworthy Republic,' Claudio Saunt can't resist telling us that's "about a trillion dollars today." And that's in the late 1830s. There's no era that doesn't break through the stratosphere.

It's taken a while to get to the point that we now read amounts of money described as being in the trillions. For those who might have struggled with math, it's worth noting that a billion is a thousand millions. Ergo, a trillion is a thousand billions.

There is of course the famous New Yorker cartoon where that kind of math can come as a complete surprise to those amongst us. Even the boss.

The progression of computers and their ability to store data has gotten us to the trillion threshold long before the federal government cracked through. For computers, it's described as a terabyte, a thousand gigabytes, a gigabyte being a billion bytes. (Actually a little more, but we won't get into that.)

When PCs came along in the early 1980s a floppy disc (look it up) could hold 512,000 bytes of data, and a megabyte, a million bytes of memory, (RAM, random access memory) was an astounding breakthrough. We've come a long way baby, and fast.

I was reading a story about classifying and naming viruses in the WSJ. The article tells us "there are more viruses on Earth than there are stars in the known universe." That takes you into the trillions. Get used to it. Trillion is the new billion.

And or course it all goes back to the senator from Illinois, Everett Dirksen, who in the 1960s once commented on how ubiquitous the quoted amounts of a million dollars had become. "A million here, and a million there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money."

How high can the numbers go?

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