Million, Billion, Trillion, and Visceralization

Been busy all day so here's a quick catch-up. A lot of things that happened today are not suitable for discussion in a blog - this thing is "on the internet", right?

In any case, the presentation by famous illustrator Nigel Holmes was thoroughly enjoyable. One thing he demonstrated was to how to show people the difference among Million, Billion, and Trillion because they look so disarmingly similar in spelling and word-length. Volunteers were lined up in the front; the "billion" guy literally competed for the same spot with the "million" guy, but the "trillion" guy... well, he was far, far away. The smart ones would think, wait, you should use logarithmic scale. But logarithmic scale has exactly the same effect as the look of the words: by logarithmic measures they'd look comparable while they're not.

Cool as this "visualization" is, it doesn't differentiate well between million and billion - they're actually at one spot. You could try to rescale the experiment (picture the "trillion" guy crashing through the walls of the Hilton Hotel like a projectile)...

In the San Francisco bay area, people have developed, knowingly or not, another way of understanding the difference between million and billion. I would even venture to claim that we Californians have a better understanding of this difference than any visualization can ever provide. We have a more primal, gut-feel, visceral understanding of the difference of million and billion. We have acquired this instinct by associating our life with millionaires and billionaires.

Before I continue with the analysis, I think I may just go ahead and establish a new branch of study, right here. Visceralization. This is more than visualization and targeted at the gut. While visualization stimulates the neocortex, visceralization excites the thalamus. For example, with visceralization you can experience a vector field, one from e.g. “high energy physics” simulation, as euphoria or, as an Alex special, an ancient kind of arousal. You can be physically “sick to the stomach” due to some anomalies in the simulation, and "a sinking feeling" tells you to change the parameters. Of course, a lab where visceralization technology is adopted would probably look like the institution in Flying over Cuckoo’s Nest, but that’s in the name of furthering science.

OK, now come back to million and billion. I’ll further qualify million as one million, and billion and one billion; let’s leave the gray area to economists. In the Valley, everybody knows a millionaire is nothing. To avoid using cliché, I’ll only remind you of the saying, “shoot in any direction and …”. Many millionaires don’t even have a house. When they want to buy a house, they can’t get a good one. When they decide to buy a not-so-good house, they stop being millionaires. Well, they can hold up a bold face and speak of “net-worth”, but we all know that they’ve got no stinking liquidity.

The billionaires, though, are a different story. There aren’t any really constraints on their life. I was to list the kind of things they can do or get, but I’d be sitting here all night. (By the way, listing such things with full abandon is a good way to visceralize the billion.) So I turn to things they can’t do - resorting to the dual space, as more academically oriented friends say - which we can count with one collective thumb. It’s not good for them to get divorced.