Important Apples Facts

I was not particularly good at Maths at school. I still am ... not particularly good. But I find Maths very puzzling.

They said on TV News the other day that an apple is worth $1 trillion. I found this very concerning and confusing.

I was concerned that if an apple is worth that much, how much is bread, milk, eggs, and other commodities worth? I was pleased to have two apple trees in my garden which supply me with plenty of fruits in summer and autumn. The photo above is a sample of the last lot.

I was confused as to what 1 trillion was. I looked it up on Google. It said, "A trillion is bigger than a million, more than a billion, it's 1,000,000,000,000 (and even or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 in some countries)."

That confused me more. How can a number mean something in one country and something else in another? How can I go to the shop and ask for 6 apples in England and get a totally different number in another country? 

I then wondered whether anyone had ever counted to 1 billion or 1 trillion. Can you imagine playing hide and seek and having to count to 1 trillion instead of just 100?

For example, let us say that Christ was born 2018 years ago. I know the more pedantic amongst us will dispute this and have another figure in mind; but let us say it was 2018 years ago. This means Jesus was born 2018 multiplied by 365 = 736,570 days ago; or 17,677,680 hours ago. That's only about 17 million hours ago, (pedantics please cool off for a minute, or an hour). This figure is already too large to countenance, never mind multiplying it by minutes or seconds.

As I said in a previous Blog post, I was once a member of a research team in the desert and my task was to count the number of grains of sands. I counted up to 23 and got tired. So I can categorically claim that there are more than 23 grains of sand in the world. My calculation was more accurate than that of the other researchers who claimed that there were X trillion grains of sand in that desert. They had estimated the number of grains in a small area or volume and multiplied it by another number they thought of. But were they accurate? What if there were two grains of sand stuck together and they counted them as one?

Do you see what I am getting at? Big numbers just don't exist. It's pointless counting them. There are not enough computers in the world to count big numbers, never mind enough brains.

It's pointless saying a country owes X trillion £ or $. They'll never be able to pay it back. What will you do? Invade them? You might as well forget their debt once they owe more than $23 and start all over again. At least that will be more accurate. Countries should only be allowed to borrow $23 at a time. And if they can't pay it back then they borrow another $23 from another country. That makes good economic sense. But is anyone listening to me? No! I am not appreciated in my own time. But years from now people will be praising my economic theory as ground-breaking and better than all the other world's economic theories.

And another thing ... shoe sizes. Why do they differ so much? Where's the Maths in that?

How can a size 9 shoe in the UK, be size 10 in the USA and size 26.5 in Europe? And that's only men. In the USA it is size 11 for women. Why is that?

I bet it is not the only thing that measures differently from one country to another. How about hats, gloves, shirts, blouses, trousers? Do people measure differently in different countries?

Let's get our measuring tapes and compare measurements, shall we?