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People have physically handled $100 bills and visited the WTC and Statue of Liberty. You want to explain abstractions in terms of concrete things like this, ra
by temphn 15y ago
People have physically handled $100 bills and visited the WTC and Statue of Liberty.
You want to explain abstractions in terms of concrete things like this, rather than in terms of other abstractions. And "GDP" is as abstract as it gets.
- smcl 15y agoI thought it was pretty sneaky to switch the base size of the tower of money in the WTC pic. For one thing including any rendition of the WTC is a powerful image, one that's usually invoked on purpose to stir emotion. Secondly to inflate, compared to the other pictures, the quantity on display is rather deceptive. Is it someone with an axe to grind, or a political motivation? The WTC imagery + "WOW LOOK AT THIS DEBT WE SOMEHOW FIND OURSELVES IN ALL OF A SUDDEN" smacks of the Tea Party\far right to me...
- ctdonath 15y agoYes, that bugged me to - and I'm a "far right Tea Party" type. Just re-arrange the prior pictures for consistency, and such wordy explanations are not needed to make sense of the visual. Oh, and the point most certainly, and apolitically, is "wow look at this debt we somehow find ourselves in all of a sudden" - 60% of the debt pile showed up in the last 4 years.
- archgoon 15y agoI don't think that really works. I've personally have handled a 1 million byte hard drive. So, if I want to understand how big a 1 trillion byte hard drive is, should I picture 1 million 1 megabyte hard drives? I've also got some RAM chips that are about 1 gigabyte in size, should I visualize the terabyte hard drive in terms of them?
- temphn 15y agoSure. That's one of the best ways to visualize what Moore's law actually means in concrete terms. What used to take a room is now in the palm of your hand. http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/?category=cmptr http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/?category=cmptr