Wondering about large to small numbers.

All my life I have worked with numbers.  Doing engineering design work mandates that, whether you are working with the deflection of beams or wind load or shear or tensile strength of materials.  Some of these numbers are huge and some small.  I have designed teeny, tiny (those are engineering terms you know) stuff with tolerances only a watch maker would appreciate to huge towering structures (OK, you want an other engineering term – “big”  or “BMF”) that you could play a foot ball game in or tall exhaust stacks or huge turbine air filters and silencers.  So size is a relevant thing.  Just look up in the night sky with a telescope and peer into the vast universe or look through a microscope to the invisible tiny world that lurks there.  Size goes both directions.

OK, a couple of trivial facts relating to the size of a number.

100 billion are the estimated number of planets in the Milky Way, our home galaxy.

1 second is how long the U.S. Naval Observatory will delay official clocks at 23:59:59 (UTC) June 30, 2012, to keep official time consistent with mean solar time.  I talked before about the earth’s orbit and its rotation changing.  So by this June it has changed another second.  Oh well, will any one notice?

You all have a great day now, you hear?