Comments on: Experiment: What 1 Million Actually Looks Like

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 08 May 2012 16:39:15 +0000

There is really 2,695 dots. Not one million. JS.

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 23:34:36 +0000

That is a lot of dots! I did a similar thing to you and created a poster with one million dots on it. You can see my poster here:

http://stickinsect.wordpress.com/2010/05/04/1-million-dots/

By: GB

GB — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 08:19:43 +0000

My imagination can’t quite be stretched to visualize a billion, but I can get a rough glimmer of it if I try.

Start with a ten-cube, then change each unit into a ten-cube itself.

Then, zoom out, as if you’d been looking at one unit of a ten-cube.

Unless you have a very vivid and multiprocess-capable imagination, this one’s a toughie.

By: Gaybag

Gaybag — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 08:15:52 +0000

I imagine cube lattices, ten units to a side, to visualize thousands, millions, and, with difficulty, billions.

One thousand is one cube, ten to a side.

One million is one cube, ten to a side, where each unit is one of the above.

By: Luke

Luke — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 21:24:50 +0000

people always talk about a million as if they actually know what it would look like if they were actually staring at one million things

I completely agree with you on this statement. Infact, I’m sure both you and I have done it many times before. Sometimes I have actually looked into it more deeply, as you have demonstrated, and am often astonished to see the results. Although, I can’t say I creae a document with X Million periods to give myself an idea, I usually just use my imagination :P

By: Damian

Damian — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 13:43:03 +0000

sorry for double posting, but it dodn’t do the code part

for ($i=0; $i


job done
and if you want a billion, just change the number.
and if your too lazy to copy the output to a file, do

for ($i=0; $i

By: Damian

Damian — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 13:41:29 +0000

job done

and if you want a billion, just change the number.

and if your too lazy to copy the output to a file, do

By: John P.

John P. — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 13:31:50 +0000

Damian, I considered writing a little script to create the file, but then I decided I could do it with C+V just as fast. Here is what I did (roughly):

First I typed and counted 20 periods.
I copied and pasted them 5 times, so now I had 100.
I copied and pasted them 10 times, so now I had 1,000.
I copied and pasted them 10 times, so now I had 10,000.
I did the same thing 2 more times to get to 1,000,000.

In fact it was so easy that I was going to keep doing it, but the document size was getting HUGE, so I decided that a nearly 1 MB download was enough for just about everyone, and also I didn't want to tax my server too much in case everyone started downloading it at once. :-) John

By: Damian

Damian — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 13:20:13 +0000

Now the question is, did you manually type 1 million periods? (and using ctrl C + V counts as manual) or did you at keast have the common sense to use a while loop to write to a text file? =P