M O N D A Y M I L L I O N *
There are plenty of things in this world that are overwhelming. Some can be that way just one at a time. Some are because they hit you from all sides at once. And some because the sheer volume of them is so huge its quite hard to really grasp the magnitude of it.
Every so often, I've contemplated the number 1,000,000 and will occassionally try something to allow me to see how big that is... or how many it is.
For instance, once I thought I'd see if I could type a million periods (not one at a time... with a computer you can type 10, then copy and paste to 100, then copy and paste to 1000, etc etc and it wouldn't take all that long). I wanted to see how many pages it would took to display them. I don't recall how it turned out. I'm thinking that I didn't finish it for some reason, any number of which are probably readily apparent to most of you wondering about anyone that would even consider doing such a thing.
Another million-experiment is one that I did complete... in fact I did so a number of times because it not only gave me a glimpse of "million-magnitude" but it demonstrated something else that I found quite interesting.... even somewhat amazing... something that we are all affected by. I thought up the experiment more to get a grasp of computers' processing speeds and just used 1 million as the limit for the experiment.
It was back when we had our first computer - first generation Mac (1984 model) but well into its life at our house. It was after Myke and Mom had much newer computers and not too long before we got our first PC in 1994 because I did this experiment on all of those computers.
To put some context to this, I will tell you that when the first Mac came out in 1984, it BLEW anything else out there on the market of home computers, and even office computers I'd used in the park service, AWAY to an impressive degree. To me owning a Mac was like someone driving a Ferrari through a parade of VW Vans.
One of my favorite things to do on that first computer was to dabble in programming and would often quite impress myself, if not others, with some of the nifty things I could make our computer do. It was fun to learn different programming tools and see what you could use them for. Some of my programs were quite lengthly and had numberous sections of pages of code each.
But the "million-experiment" was a really simply program. It would just count from 0 to one million while displaying the current number on the screen.
The first version was only about 5 or six lines long. It used a black screen and displayed the current number in a single data field. 1, 2, 3, ..... 101, 102, ....234,516, 234,517 etc etc. But before it even got to 10,000 I realized the program was slower than it could be and I tweeked it by adding another 15 or 20 lines of programming so that instead of erasing the entire number and printing the entire new number, it just did kinda like the old (prior to digital) odometers did on your car. It only incremented the "ones" column until it had gone through 10, then kicked the "tens" column up one number, and so and and so on. The revised program was amazingly faster and I mention all this cause I kinda felt pretty smart figuring out such a simple thing, and how to make it better.
At this point you are probably thinking. Well surely it coulda counted to a million quicker than I could have rewritten the program.
Well here's the deal. A million is BIG.... was way big then.... and WAY WAY BIG with version one of my program. After it got up into the thousands I was already looking at my timer.... yeah I had a kitchen timer cause I was pretty sure it was gonna be a matter of minutes at the most... and started doing some math on how long it was gonna take. I'm not going to tell what that projection was here... just that it would have been something like 2 to 5 times longer than what I was fairly sure I could do with a new version. And even if it was only gonna be 2 times as long, I didn't want to wait even THAT long.
Well, here is how it went.
Finished up and started running "Million.exe" v2.0.000.00.0.000.0.0000.0.00000.0 about 8pm. Watched it a while and was fairly sure I had the program working as efficiently as it could be. With the timer and again doing the math I realized that I needed to set our alarm clock to 3:15am so we (yes Verona was as excited about this as I was.... ha ha... and hardly... but she was a good sport as she always acts interested in my "endeavors") could see the number approach 9 9 9 , 9 9 9 and switch to 1, 0 0 0 , 0 0 0. I'd done good math and sure enough within 10 mintutes of waking up we watched the digits flicker column by column toward a straight across row of nines.... which we really didn't hardly see because the tens and ones columns were flickering along pretty fast... and soon it STOPPED COLD on 1,000,000 and I smiled. And yet, I was still quite amazed that it took the Bindblowing Speed of the MAC 7 1/2 hours to count to a million.
A million was really big! (And yes, I did have the thought that "I wish I had (not a nickel") but a buck for everytime that one's column had clicked to the next number. Followed shortly by "the buck stops here"... looking at "1,000,000" in the center of the black screen.... that the bucks stopping there would be just fine with me.)
Well the whole idea of this blog entry was to give you a sense of millionness, millionarity, million-magnitutous etc etc.
Oh... and for those curious about how computers have gotten faster.
I ran the program on Mom's computer (est 1990 model) and it took only 30 minutes!
A short while later I ran it on Myke and Cheya's new computer and it took only about 10 minutes!
When we got our first IBMish PC I ran it again and it took 7.5 minutes which surprised me because the processor speed was listed several multiples faster than Myke and Cheya's. (I don't recall those processor speeds, but the lenghts of time for running the Million Program have stayed in my mind for some reason).
It occurs to me that computers are much much faster now than the last time I ran that program 12 years ago. If I ever figure out how to run a BASIC program on Windows XP I would like to try it again and see what the new time would be.
But the point of this blog is that a million is pretty huge.
Other MONDAY MILLION entries will be about things of similar magnitude*. In fact my first thought along this line is what I will write in a few minutes. But I just felt that I should share some sense of what a million is.
Incidentally, this blog entry contains 6927 characters. You'd have to copy and paste it 144.323 times in order for the whole bunch to include 1 million characters.
*Or multiples of, significant fractions of, or give or take a few dozen, or thousand etc. Point is... things mentioned here include a LOT of inidividual elements of concern.
There are plenty of things in this world that are overwhelming. Some can be that way just one at a time. Some are because they hit you from all sides at once. And some because the sheer volume of them is so huge its quite hard to really grasp the magnitude of it.
Every so often, I've contemplated the number 1,000,000 and will occassionally try something to allow me to see how big that is... or how many it is.
For instance, once I thought I'd see if I could type a million periods (not one at a time... with a computer you can type 10, then copy and paste to 100, then copy and paste to 1000, etc etc and it wouldn't take all that long). I wanted to see how many pages it would took to display them. I don't recall how it turned out. I'm thinking that I didn't finish it for some reason, any number of which are probably readily apparent to most of you wondering about anyone that would even consider doing such a thing.
Another million-experiment is one that I did complete... in fact I did so a number of times because it not only gave me a glimpse of "million-magnitude" but it demonstrated something else that I found quite interesting.... even somewhat amazing... something that we are all affected by. I thought up the experiment more to get a grasp of computers' processing speeds and just used 1 million as the limit for the experiment.
It was back when we had our first computer - first generation Mac (1984 model) but well into its life at our house. It was after Myke and Mom had much newer computers and not too long before we got our first PC in 1994 because I did this experiment on all of those computers.
To put some context to this, I will tell you that when the first Mac came out in 1984, it BLEW anything else out there on the market of home computers, and even office computers I'd used in the park service, AWAY to an impressive degree. To me owning a Mac was like someone driving a Ferrari through a parade of VW Vans.
One of my favorite things to do on that first computer was to dabble in programming and would often quite impress myself, if not others, with some of the nifty things I could make our computer do. It was fun to learn different programming tools and see what you could use them for. Some of my programs were quite lengthly and had numberous sections of pages of code each.
But the "million-experiment" was a really simply program. It would just count from 0 to one million while displaying the current number on the screen.
The first version was only about 5 or six lines long. It used a black screen and displayed the current number in a single data field. 1, 2, 3, ..... 101, 102, ....234,516, 234,517 etc etc. But before it even got to 10,000 I realized the program was slower than it could be and I tweeked it by adding another 15 or 20 lines of programming so that instead of erasing the entire number and printing the entire new number, it just did kinda like the old (prior to digital) odometers did on your car. It only incremented the "ones" column until it had gone through 10, then kicked the "tens" column up one number, and so and and so on. The revised program was amazingly faster and I mention all this cause I kinda felt pretty smart figuring out such a simple thing, and how to make it better.
At this point you are probably thinking. Well surely it coulda counted to a million quicker than I could have rewritten the program.
Well here's the deal. A million is BIG.... was way big then.... and WAY WAY BIG with version one of my program. After it got up into the thousands I was already looking at my timer.... yeah I had a kitchen timer cause I was pretty sure it was gonna be a matter of minutes at the most... and started doing some math on how long it was gonna take. I'm not going to tell what that projection was here... just that it would have been something like 2 to 5 times longer than what I was fairly sure I could do with a new version. And even if it was only gonna be 2 times as long, I didn't want to wait even THAT long.
Well, here is how it went.
Finished up and started running "Million.exe" v2.0.000.00.0.000.0.0000.0.00000.0 about 8pm. Watched it a while and was fairly sure I had the program working as efficiently as it could be. With the timer and again doing the math I realized that I needed to set our alarm clock to 3:15am so we (yes Verona was as excited about this as I was.... ha ha... and hardly... but she was a good sport as she always acts interested in my "endeavors") could see the number approach 9 9 9 , 9 9 9 and switch to 1, 0 0 0 , 0 0 0. I'd done good math and sure enough within 10 mintutes of waking up we watched the digits flicker column by column toward a straight across row of nines.... which we really didn't hardly see because the tens and ones columns were flickering along pretty fast... and soon it STOPPED COLD on 1,000,000 and I smiled. And yet, I was still quite amazed that it took the Bindblowing Speed of the MAC 7 1/2 hours to count to a million.
A million was really big! (And yes, I did have the thought that "I wish I had (not a nickel") but a buck for everytime that one's column had clicked to the next number. Followed shortly by "the buck stops here"... looking at "1,000,000" in the center of the black screen.... that the bucks stopping there would be just fine with me.)
Well the whole idea of this blog entry was to give you a sense of millionness, millionarity, million-magnitutous etc etc.
Oh... and for those curious about how computers have gotten faster.
I ran the program on Mom's computer (est 1990 model) and it took only 30 minutes!
A short while later I ran it on Myke and Cheya's new computer and it took only about 10 minutes!
When we got our first IBMish PC I ran it again and it took 7.5 minutes which surprised me because the processor speed was listed several multiples faster than Myke and Cheya's. (I don't recall those processor speeds, but the lenghts of time for running the Million Program have stayed in my mind for some reason).
It occurs to me that computers are much much faster now than the last time I ran that program 12 years ago. If I ever figure out how to run a BASIC program on Windows XP I would like to try it again and see what the new time would be.
But the point of this blog is that a million is pretty huge.
Other MONDAY MILLION entries will be about things of similar magnitude*. In fact my first thought along this line is what I will write in a few minutes. But I just felt that I should share some sense of what a million is.
Incidentally, this blog entry contains 6927 characters. You'd have to copy and paste it 144.323 times in order for the whole bunch to include 1 million characters.
*Or multiples of, significant fractions of, or give or take a few dozen, or thousand etc. Point is... things mentioned here include a LOT of inidividual elements of concern.
posted by ReveryWings at
8:42 AM
3 Comments:
Really interesting. Obviously a million is relevant - but not to me or you.
By
Booklogged, at Tuesday, September 12, 2006 4:35:00 PM
I have seen a million dollars before, but not all in ones. That would be horrendous. Still, when you work with paper money much, it starts to lose a value in your mind. It becomes just paper. I'd much rather have a balance in a high-yield account starting at $1,000,000.00 and every monthly statement showing that beautiful interest earned.
By
Framed, at Thursday, September 14, 2006 11:20:00 AM
I don't think I've ever seen a million dollars all at once... except in Las Vegas I think there is a hotel with like a million dollars "worth" of shredded money in a clear plastic container.... or so it said.
The most cache I've ever held in my hands is around $2,500. And it wasn't mine. Sigh.
By
ReveryWings, at Thursday, September 14, 2006 2:32:00 PM
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