The question there was something like "roughly how big is 2^24?". I actually think that's a reasonable enough question, but anyway there's a nice story about th

The question there was something like "roughly how big is 2^24?". I actually think that's a reasonable enough question, but anyway there's a nice story about this same question in another context. The mathematician Solomon Golomb was (as an undergraduate, I think) taking some sort of biology class, and the lecturer described some process to do with cell division and said "... so the number of ways to do that is 2^24, and we all know that that is, don't we?" (meaning, of course, "and no one knows what that is but it's OK because I'm about to tell you". But Golomb happened to have been memorizing numbers of the form n^n, and 2^24 = 8^8, so he immediately called out "Yes, it's 16777216". As a result of having read this story, I can now always instantly remember what 2^24 is too :-).