It provides no information other than "big number is big, lol." As an accurate, useful comparison it falls short, and there's a political agenda behind it (I h

It provides no information other than "big number is big, lol." As an accurate, useful comparison it falls short, and there's a political agenda behind it (I hate politics, yet I'm commenting). But people don't regularly wrap their brain around how big a trillion really is. Had the site used sticks, marbles, pebbles or even an illustration related to time, it would have been useful. I remember as a child being taught the difference between a million and a billion in that manner and it was important to my relative understanding of numbers. Most people don't work with big numbers all day and could gain something from just that simple point ... big numbers are big. It's dishonest, though, and reminds me of why I hate politics. At university, I had a philosophy professor who argued injustice by comparing the percentage of African-Americans on death row vs. other nations of origin, to the percentage of the African-Americans in the US population vs. other nations of origin. He provided those two numbers and much of the class was shocked. The problem is that the US doesn't pick random citizens to be on death row, it picks citizens who are convicted of capital crimes. A more honest comparison (and, still yet, illustrative of the point, though less dramatic) would be to compare the number of African-Americans convicted of a capital crime and sentenced to death with the same rates of other minority groups (or even against everyone else as a whole would be an improvement), and then, of course, diving into conviction rates, reasonably provable false conviction rates and the host of other variables that enter into an imperfect system that is imperfect because human beings are imperfect. EDIT: Improper use of asterisks. Tsk Tsk. Corrected my description of the professor's comparison by adding "vs. other nations of origin" since that's more accurate.