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The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million

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Re: The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million

#131

Post by colejohnson66 »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #125
mrandish wrote: post #91

> For all we know, the middle is just air and crumpled-up old newspaper. I think this is the answer. I suspect the exhibit designers had a cool idea for a display, did a rough estimate of the area needed and then commissioned the exhibit builders to make the big metal-framed cube. Either they made an error in their calculation or the innate variability in the size of stacks of used bills threw it off. It's also possi…

What’s the point of disseminating the technical reasoning behind it? I think it’s better served to use this as an analogy of how the federal government handles money.

They handle money by putting them in cubes of glass?

Non-snark: Because it's fun to theorize.

Re: The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million

#133

Post by dogecoinbase »

stavros wrote: post #81
jerf wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just for fun, the maximum sized cube you could make with a single layer of them facing flat and then entirely hollow on the inside would be about 41 meters or so on a side. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=sqrt%28%28area+of+a+uni...

I can't argue with the math, but intuitively that just seems really small? It means that you can lay down 166,000 $1 bills on the floor of a very small flat?

41 meters is the height of a 13-story building.

Re: The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million

#135

Post by ticulatedspline »

Seems silly at first but in retrospect isn't that surprising to construct from requirements:

1: we want a big cube

2: has to have a million dollars

3: should be stacked neatly.

Given the bills are so evenly arranged on the lower surface there's only so many squares you can produce with the bills like that. 8x19 or 6x17 . 6x17 is noted as close to 1 mill but they only remove 2 stacks from the 100 side. so now it's not a cube, you'd come under if you trimmed it down to a cube.

so stacked flat seems 8x19 is the smallest square you can make for one side for a cube of cash that fits mil. so they did that and just filled it up.

It might be hollow, there's certainly a void. There's some comments about the border but you can clearly see that the bills don't go behind the border so the corners are squared in, which means there's probably a weird void of some sort because it's not really a normal cube.

Re: The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million

#136

Post by JadeNB »

c249709 wrote: post #99
JadeNB wrote: post #83

Why in the world would you use KaTeX to write a number that is just being used as a number, not part of a mathematical formula? But, if you must, at least use some tricks to make the spacing work correctly: since TeX treats `,` as `mathpunct`, you need to use something like `\$1{,}000{,}000` (or change its catcode) to get something that renders as a plain old non-KaTeXed "$1,000,000" would.

thanks for the tip! I just wanted all the numbers to look the same

Oh, that makes sense! I was so caught up on the article beginning that way that it didn't occur to me that there'd be formulas later on, and it makes sense to want the numbers to appear the same in and out of formulas. Thank you for fixing the spacing, and nice article!

Re: The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million

#137

Post by padjo »

stavros wrote: post #81
jerf wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just for fun, the maximum sized cube you could make with a single layer of them facing flat and then entirely hollow on the inside would be about 41 meters or so on a side. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=sqrt%28%28area+of+a+uni...

I can't argue with the math, but intuitively that just seems really small? It means that you can lay down 166,000 $1 bills on the floor of a very small flat?

A flat with very high ceilings?

Edit: even still 41x41 floorspace is a very large flat.

Re: The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million

#138

Post by mh- »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #33

Do we truly know if the Middle is all dollar bills and not filler?

This felt like the most obvious explanation to me as well. Maybe the artist's vision for it was a solid cube of cash, but it ended up needing a structure inside to support the thing.

So many reasons this might be exactly $1,000,000 but not sum up on the outside.

That said, this is also something I would have spent way too much time overthinking, so I thoroughly enjoyed reading the blog post.

Re: The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million

#139

Post by somat »

You need a cube that is a multiple of the width of a dollar on one side and a multiple of the height of a dollar on the other side. technically it needs to be a a multiple of the thickness of a stack of 100 dollars as well.

us dollar size: Width: 6.14 inches (155.956 mm) Height: 2.61 inches (66.294 mm) Thick x100: 0.43 inches (10.922 mm)

How close over a million dollars can you make this cube?

The exhibit picked a cube ~50 inches. 8 wide = 49.1 inch 19 tall = 49.6 inch.

But this assumes that having a perfect "cube" of bills was the artistic vision.

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