Rice bytes: best way I’ve seen to understand giga, mega, peta and such

I love anything that makes it easier for people to know what’s going on. Case in point: this tweet yesterday from Twitter friend David Grayson @Sasanof, from the IBM Watson Summit in New Zealand.

You can use this to understand enormous sums of money, too:

$1 = one grain of rice
$1000 = cup of rice
$1 million = 8 bags of rice
$1 billion = 3 trailer trucks of rice
$1 trillion = 2 ocean freighters (3,000 truckloads)
$3 trillion (the US healthcare budget) = 6 ships (9,000 truckloads)

When someone says a health improvement project will save (or cost us) $100 million a year, it’s a lot, but think:

• The proposed amount is like 800 bags of rice.
• The US health budget is 9,000 truckloads of rice

Puts it in perspective.

Thanks to @Green_Goddess, Caroline Taylor, CMO of IBM Global Markets, for the visualization, and to @Sasanof for tweeting it. Don’t I love how social media helps ideas spread??

Update next day:

One of my very early blog posts, on my old blog, was on this same subject. March 9, 2009: Comprehending the US healthcare budget. Here are the graphics from that one:

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Here’s a million bucks’ worth of $100 bills. (That’s 100 packets of 100 $100 bills; each packet is 1/2″ thick.)

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Here’s 100 times as much – a million hundred-dollar bills, $100 million:

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Ten of those – a billion:

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And a thousand of those – a trillion. Check out the little dude, who’s now in the bottom left corner:

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And US healthcare is three times that size.

This helps me, for one, start to comprehend the magnitude of the problem. Something like that does not shrink willingly: lots of people would lose their jobs, including CEOs etc.  That’s why I liken US healthcare to “a tumor that doesn’t know how to stop growing and killing its host.”

Go back up and take a look at the size of one million in this picture. Urk.