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BBC Dimensions

 
August 20, 2010
 

Visualizing the $12 trillion U.S. deficit

The BBC has launched an interactive visualization site called BBC Dimensions. It provides overlays of historical and scientific information onto a postal code.Careful with that link as it'll cost you at least 10 minutes of your life.

Anyway, the BBC Dimension site got me thinking about another large number we hear a lot about these days: the U.S. budget deficit. Right now, it's hovering around $12 trillion dollars. When we hear that figure we typically hear things like,"If that were a stack of $1 bills it would stretch all the way to Alpha Centauri" or whatever. But that's still abstract because I can't picture how far Alpha Centauri is.

So I thought, I wish someone would put that into perspective with small units, something I can relate to. Then I figured I'd just try. 

 So here goes:

Ants
Ants are about 1/10th of an inch long and about 1/20th of an inch wide. Converted to cm^2, that's about .25cm by .125cm or .03125cm^2. Multiply that by 12,000,000,000,000 and convert to km^2 and you have an area 37.5 square kilometers or 14.5 square miles of ants stacked leg to leg. Here's what a sea of 12 trillion ants would look like in Washington, DC:
Ants
Mice
So ants aren't super impressive although that would be a mighty ant mound. Let's go with the common field mouse (10cm long x 4cm wide ~ 40cm^2). Times 12 trillion. That's about 48,000 square kilometers or about 18,500 square miles. Basically that's mice carpeting the entire, sprawling Atlanta metro area:
Mice
House cats
Since I don't have a neat API to help me with these overlays (hint hint), let's finish with cats. (40cm long not counting tails x 15cm wide ~600cm^2). Times 12 trillion = 720,000km^2 or about 275,000 square miles. Now this is pretty impressive. Parked over the East coast, this looks like:
Cats1
Centered over Kentucky, you see it stretches from Atlanta to Chicago and well out over the Midwest:
Cats2
Finally, for the West Coast. Yes, that is an entire state of Nevada full of cats, plus a healthy chunk of California.
Cats3

That's a lot of debt.

 

Filed under  //   BBC Dimensions   U.S. deficit   debt   info-viz   visualization  

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