What's the smallest amount you can spend for a million of something?
September 16, 2021 6:55 AM Subscribe
An ongoing twitter thread exploring the lowest it's possible to spend to get a million of something.
"Manufactured products only, must be ordered by specific quantity written on the pack or in singles ('pack of 10'). Must not be ordered by volume ('ml')."
In ninth grade, my biology teacher went on a rant about how kids have no concept of large numbers.
"You kids don't have any notion of how big a million is. To help you understand, I have a plan: we're going to collect a million pennies and then use the money for a pizza party."
"Um, isn't a million pennies $10,000?"
That would have been a helluva pizza party.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:01 AM on September 16, 2021 [44 favorites]
"You kids don't have any notion of how big a million is. To help you understand, I have a plan: we're going to collect a million pennies and then use the money for a pizza party."
"Um, isn't a million pennies $10,000?"
That would have been a helluva pizza party.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:01 AM on September 16, 2021 [44 favorites]
does a 1 megabit dram count? they are all inside a single chip, so it's hard to separate them out...
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 7:05 AM on September 16, 2021 [6 favorites]
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 7:05 AM on September 16, 2021 [6 favorites]
Delivery Instructions: Please Sharpie "Pack of 1,000,000" on this 1kg bag of couscous, I am trying to win a contest
posted by aws17576 at 7:25 AM on September 16, 2021 [24 favorites]
posted by aws17576 at 7:25 AM on September 16, 2021 [24 favorites]
Got a sec?
Got eleven and a half days?
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 7:26 AM on September 16, 2021 [15 favorites]
Got eleven and a half days?
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 7:26 AM on September 16, 2021 [15 favorites]
I guess it stretches the meaning of "manufactured" but yeast is pretty cheap.
100 billion cells at $7.99 = $0.0000799 per million cells
posted by ArgentCorvid at 7:29 AM on September 16, 2021 [18 favorites]
100 billion cells at $7.99 = $0.0000799 per million cells
posted by ArgentCorvid at 7:29 AM on September 16, 2021 [18 favorites]
I was going to object that yeast is sold by weight, but then I checked the page and sure enough it's labeled by number, not weight. But I'm pretty sure they're not counting out 100 billion cells, which makes it questionable? But then I bet the 1,000,000 clothes tags in the tweet probably aren't counted out exactly, either.
What if they'll only sell you 100 billion and not 1 million?
posted by clawsoon at 7:34 AM on September 16, 2021 [2 favorites]
What if they'll only sell you 100 billion and not 1 million?
posted by clawsoon at 7:34 AM on September 16, 2021 [2 favorites]
I was thinking staples. A 5 pack of 5000 staples (so 25,000) is $3.98 on Amazon, which would be just under $160. Unless my math is off by a decimal somewhere. Oh wait! Those are fancy NAME BRAND staples, who's got that kind of money?
Here we go: with the quantity discount for 200 boxes you can get a million staples for $102.
posted by dirtdirt at 7:46 AM on September 16, 2021 [8 favorites]
Here we go: with the quantity discount for 200 boxes you can get a million staples for $102.
posted by dirtdirt at 7:46 AM on September 16, 2021 [8 favorites]
"You kids don't have any notion of how big a million is.
In Cheaper by the Dozen (or its sequel - I can't remember which) the Gilbreth children describe how their father, efficiency expert Frank Bunker Gilbreth, decided that the children needed to learn the concept of one million. So he took a large sheet of drafting paper, hand-ruled a 1,000 x 1,000 line grid on it, and hung it up in the living room. THAT'S dedication!
posted by Multicellular Exothermic at 7:57 AM on September 16, 2021 [10 favorites]
In Cheaper by the Dozen (or its sequel - I can't remember which) the Gilbreth children describe how their father, efficiency expert Frank Bunker Gilbreth, decided that the children needed to learn the concept of one million. So he took a large sheet of drafting paper, hand-ruled a 1,000 x 1,000 line grid on it, and hung it up in the living room. THAT'S dedication!
posted by Multicellular Exothermic at 7:57 AM on September 16, 2021 [10 favorites]
"You kids don't have any notion of how big a million is."
As a child, I was fascinated by the book One Million by Hendrik Hertzberg.
posted by fairmettle at 8:02 AM on September 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
As a child, I was fascinated by the book One Million by Hendrik Hertzberg.
posted by fairmettle at 8:02 AM on September 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
£31.32 including VAT for at least a million bubbles
posted by chavenet at 8:05 AM on September 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by chavenet at 8:05 AM on September 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
Relevant: Jonathan Borofsky's Counting from 1 to 3227146, pen and pencil on paper, 1969 - 1986
posted by chavenet at 8:08 AM on September 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by chavenet at 8:08 AM on September 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
I guessed spaghetti noodles, but apparently there are 500 in a pack, each pack $1, so it'd be $2000 worth. Gotta keep looking.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:17 AM on September 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:17 AM on September 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
I would hypothesize you would want 1,000,000 of the least valued single printed (or minted) unit of currency in the world. I can't quickly determine what that might be though.
posted by stevis23 at 8:37 AM on September 16, 2021 [5 favorites]
posted by stevis23 at 8:37 AM on September 16, 2021 [5 favorites]
1,000,000 Venezuelan Bolivares in United States Dollars today is $4.02
posted by JoeZydeco at 8:41 AM on September 16, 2021 [14 favorites]
posted by JoeZydeco at 8:41 AM on September 16, 2021 [14 favorites]
Someone else pointed out if you bought 1,000,000 barrels of oil on 20-Apr-2020 the price would have been -$40,000,000.
posted by JoeZydeco at 8:44 AM on September 16, 2021 [24 favorites]
posted by JoeZydeco at 8:44 AM on September 16, 2021 [24 favorites]
"You kids don't have any notion of how big a million is. To help you understand, I have a plan: we're going to collect a million pennies and then use the money for a pizza party."
In Louis Sachar's Wayside School books (I forget which one), the students collect a million nail clippings.
posted by uncleozzy at 8:47 AM on September 16, 2021 [3 favorites]
In Louis Sachar's Wayside School books (I forget which one), the students collect a million nail clippings.
posted by uncleozzy at 8:47 AM on September 16, 2021 [3 favorites]
You can buy a million resistors for $880.
posted by biogeo at 8:47 AM on September 16, 2021 [4 favorites]
posted by biogeo at 8:47 AM on September 16, 2021 [4 favorites]
4TB hard disk drive, AU$139; that's AU $0.00000434375 per million addressable bits of storage.
posted by flabdablet at 8:48 AM on September 16, 2021
posted by flabdablet at 8:48 AM on September 16, 2021
moles are numbers
chemicals are sold by the mole.....sometimes
problem: is very difficult to buy ~10 attomoles of anything
posted by lalochezia at 8:51 AM on September 16, 2021 [7 favorites]
chemicals are sold by the mole.....sometimes
problem: is very difficult to buy ~10 attomoles of anything
posted by lalochezia at 8:51 AM on September 16, 2021 [7 favorites]
Seriously, though, the million staple racket is just the inkjet racket turned inside out. First you order a million staples for $3.73 and you feel all clever, but then, naturally, you start hankering for a stapler that can hold them all and that's where they fuck you
posted by aws17576 at 8:54 AM on September 16, 2021 [38 favorites]
posted by aws17576 at 8:54 AM on September 16, 2021 [38 favorites]
Any thrift store will sell you a crappy old digital camera for a dollar or two, and they're all at least 1 megapixel.
posted by oulipian at 9:06 AM on September 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by oulipian at 9:06 AM on September 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
I'm thinking stickers. The limit to how many you can squeeze on a roll depends on the precision of your cutters, and they can be really small.
posted by rouftop at 9:12 AM on September 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by rouftop at 9:12 AM on September 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
The current leader: Styrofoam balls.
posted by brainwane at 9:24 AM on September 16, 2021 [7 favorites]
posted by brainwane at 9:24 AM on September 16, 2021 [7 favorites]
I've got a quart of yogurt that advertises "billions of probiotics per serving," and it has 5 servings in the container. I think it cost about $3.50. Booyah.
posted by adamrice at 9:31 AM on September 16, 2021 [3 favorites]
posted by adamrice at 9:31 AM on September 16, 2021 [3 favorites]
I was thinking something like fuse beads: manufactured by slicing individual beads off a longer, cheaply produced, plastic tube. The machine would, I assume, have a pretty exact idea of the number of beads produced. Or at least could be programmed to keep a tally. Styrofoam balls makes sense, but I have a hard time envisioning them being made individually, but rather en-masse through some sort of blowing, rotating apparatus. Surely they aren't counting individual styrofoam balls but rather calculating an approximate number based on weight.
posted by St. Oops at 9:42 AM on September 16, 2021
posted by St. Oops at 9:42 AM on September 16, 2021
This breaks the rules, but it's about 20,000 to 25,000 grains of rice per pound. You can get a 50 pound bag of cheap white rice for about $25.
"Rice is great if you're really hungry and want to eat two thousand of something."
-Mitch Hedberg
posted by loquacious at 9:45 AM on September 16, 2021 [11 favorites]
"Rice is great if you're really hungry and want to eat two thousand of something."
-Mitch Hedberg
posted by loquacious at 9:45 AM on September 16, 2021 [11 favorites]
St. Oops: "I was thinking something like fuse beads"
It seemed promising, but as cheap as they are to manufacture, I guess they're too valuable as a product. Generally more than a dollar per thousand, and the best deal on Amazon right now is still around $850 for a million.
So, yeah, looking at things that don't need labelling, marketing, user friendly packaging... just industrial detritus seems the way to go.
posted by team lowkey at 10:12 AM on September 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
It seemed promising, but as cheap as they are to manufacture, I guess they're too valuable as a product. Generally more than a dollar per thousand, and the best deal on Amazon right now is still around $850 for a million.
So, yeah, looking at things that don't need labelling, marketing, user friendly packaging... just industrial detritus seems the way to go.
posted by team lowkey at 10:12 AM on September 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
I would hypothesize you would want 1,000,000 of the least valued single printed (or minted) unit of currency in the world. I can't quickly determine what that might be though.A million Russian Kopeks is 137 USD. Finding anyone who has more than a couple packs of 10 of them taped together will be the hard part.
posted by eotvos at 10:15 AM on September 16, 2021 [2 favorites]
In Louis Sachar's Wayside School books (I forget which one), the students collect a million nail clippings
Do you want Fimbulvetr? Because that's how you get Fimbulvetr.
posted by Joe in Australia at 10:18 AM on September 16, 2021 [6 favorites]
Do you want Fimbulvetr? Because that's how you get Fimbulvetr.
posted by Joe in Australia at 10:18 AM on September 16, 2021 [6 favorites]
Staples come in strips, IIRC. The stapler does the final separation. So they don't really count.
posted by Splunge at 10:29 AM on September 16, 2021 [4 favorites]
posted by Splunge at 10:29 AM on September 16, 2021 [4 favorites]
Also, a tangent about a million of something:
At one point my dad's screen printing shop printed, handled and shipped a bit over a million t-shirts in a single month. It was a lot of work.
I think the largest number of t-shirts we had in the building at any given time was about 50,000 or so, which was still a lot of t-shirts in one place. T-shirts usually come in boxes of 6 dozen, so, 50,000 t-shirts is like a couple of large cargo semi trailers full.
When were were bulk handling this many t-shirts we had a method of just stacking them flat on plain old cargo pallets about shoulder height because it was a lot easier than trying to handle stacks and folds of one dozen each, which toppled over after about eight stacks or folds of a dozen. It also kept them relatively wrinkle free.
And 50-100k t-shirts would consume a significant portion of our 40,000 square foot industrial/commercial building, even when stacked flat on cargo pallets. It's like, i don't know, ten or twenty walmarts worth of T-shirt stock. (Not walmarts full of t-shirts, but about how many t-shirts might be in a given walmart as normal stock.)
To put this in perspective on the production side of things we were usually aiming for production rates of 2,000 to as much as 6,000 t-shirts per hour, per screen printing machine, and we had three large automatic screen printing presses.
And during that month we ran double and sometimes triple shifts - *checks math* - which, yeah, for 730 hours a month even with downtime, breakdowns or other production issues and/or not running triple shifts that math checks out.
It's theoretically possible that we could have done something like 4 million T-shirts in a month running at full tilt with zero problems, but ideal world scenarios just don't exist in textile screen printing or the garment industry because Murphy's Law is like 10x the normal rate in that industry.
posted by loquacious at 10:31 AM on September 16, 2021 [13 favorites]
At one point my dad's screen printing shop printed, handled and shipped a bit over a million t-shirts in a single month. It was a lot of work.
I think the largest number of t-shirts we had in the building at any given time was about 50,000 or so, which was still a lot of t-shirts in one place. T-shirts usually come in boxes of 6 dozen, so, 50,000 t-shirts is like a couple of large cargo semi trailers full.
When were were bulk handling this many t-shirts we had a method of just stacking them flat on plain old cargo pallets about shoulder height because it was a lot easier than trying to handle stacks and folds of one dozen each, which toppled over after about eight stacks or folds of a dozen. It also kept them relatively wrinkle free.
And 50-100k t-shirts would consume a significant portion of our 40,000 square foot industrial/commercial building, even when stacked flat on cargo pallets. It's like, i don't know, ten or twenty walmarts worth of T-shirt stock. (Not walmarts full of t-shirts, but about how many t-shirts might be in a given walmart as normal stock.)
To put this in perspective on the production side of things we were usually aiming for production rates of 2,000 to as much as 6,000 t-shirts per hour, per screen printing machine, and we had three large automatic screen printing presses.
And during that month we ran double and sometimes triple shifts - *checks math* - which, yeah, for 730 hours a month even with downtime, breakdowns or other production issues and/or not running triple shifts that math checks out.
It's theoretically possible that we could have done something like 4 million T-shirts in a month running at full tilt with zero problems, but ideal world scenarios just don't exist in textile screen printing or the garment industry because Murphy's Law is like 10x the normal rate in that industry.
posted by loquacious at 10:31 AM on September 16, 2021 [13 favorites]
> I was going to object that yeast is sold by weight, but then I checked the page and sure enough it's labeled by number, not weight. But I'm pretty sure they're not counting out 100 billion cells, which makes it questionable? But then I bet the 1,000,000 clothes tags in the tweet probably aren't counted out exactly, either.
Bulk quantities of small things are often sold by weight too. The factory or the packager uses QC statistics to estimate how many of an item there are in a pound, or in a kilogram, so that when the package is labeled "1000 items" what it means is that there are enough items in the package to weigh, for example, 368 grams ±20g, because production line scales are generally cheaper than production line item counters, especially when the items in question are soft, perishable or awkwardly shaped. Buying a thousand packages can be reasonably expected to yield 1,000,000 items, and will probably be over by a little (because nobody's ever demanded compensation from a vendor because their package of things had too many of the things) but you might luck out and only get 999,973 items.
posted by ardgedee at 10:46 AM on September 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
Bulk quantities of small things are often sold by weight too. The factory or the packager uses QC statistics to estimate how many of an item there are in a pound, or in a kilogram, so that when the package is labeled "1000 items" what it means is that there are enough items in the package to weigh, for example, 368 grams ±20g, because production line scales are generally cheaper than production line item counters, especially when the items in question are soft, perishable or awkwardly shaped. Buying a thousand packages can be reasonably expected to yield 1,000,000 items, and will probably be over by a little (because nobody's ever demanded compensation from a vendor because their package of things had too many of the things) but you might luck out and only get 999,973 items.
posted by ardgedee at 10:46 AM on September 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
I can't even get a million likes and they weigh and cost nothing.
posted by srboisvert at 10:52 AM on September 16, 2021 [10 favorites]
posted by srboisvert at 10:52 AM on September 16, 2021 [10 favorites]
"Someone else pointed out if you bought 1,000,000 barrels of oil on 20-Apr-2020 the price would have been -$40,000,000."
Though, playing by the rules, you can't just buy the oil which is by volume. You'd have to buy it in actual oil drums which are basically 1:1 with barrels. The cheapest ones I spotted on Alibaba, used I'd assume, cost $150/drum. So even if the oil price was still -$40/barrel it'd still cost you at least $110M to buy a million barrels of oil in used oil drums.
posted by Hairy Lobster at 11:12 AM on September 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
Though, playing by the rules, you can't just buy the oil which is by volume. You'd have to buy it in actual oil drums which are basically 1:1 with barrels. The cheapest ones I spotted on Alibaba, used I'd assume, cost $150/drum. So even if the oil price was still -$40/barrel it'd still cost you at least $110M to buy a million barrels of oil in used oil drums.
posted by Hairy Lobster at 11:12 AM on September 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
Staples come in strips, IIRC. The stapler does the final separation. So they don't really count.
They're individually discernable even in strip form, so that doesn't really matter.
I suppose you could get some solvent to dissolve the glue holding them together if you really wanted a pile of free staples. It would probably require some experimentation to determine what that would add to the cost.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 11:52 AM on September 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
They're individually discernable even in strip form, so that doesn't really matter.
I suppose you could get some solvent to dissolve the glue holding them together if you really wanted a pile of free staples. It would probably require some experimentation to determine what that would add to the cost.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 11:52 AM on September 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
Staples come in strips, IIRC. The stapler does the final separation. So they don't really count.
Though they are packaged in strips, staples come in boxes of 5,000. The promise isn't 25 strips of 200 staples, it's 5,000 staples. Per the rules of the contest, staples count.
Plus they stack nicely and could be neatly displayed in an appropriately sized clear plastic box.
posted by donpardo at 11:52 AM on September 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
Though they are packaged in strips, staples come in boxes of 5,000. The promise isn't 25 strips of 200 staples, it's 5,000 staples. Per the rules of the contest, staples count.
Plus they stack nicely and could be neatly displayed in an appropriately sized clear plastic box.
posted by donpardo at 11:52 AM on September 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
This is a little off the topic, but from CBC Radio this archived 13:47 (Peter Gzowski and Stuart McLean, what can you buy for a buck kind of thing) is just a lovely piece of radio: A sleeping cricket. I know some die-hard Vinyl Cafe fans out there, I'm not one of them, but I think Canada misses Stuart McLean (and Peter Gzowski) a bit.
Wow, that gave me pause: "The City of Toronto will sell you a thousand gallons of water for $2."
posted by elkevelvet at 12:01 PM on September 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
Wow, that gave me pause: "The City of Toronto will sell you a thousand gallons of water for $2."
posted by elkevelvet at 12:01 PM on September 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
Tangential, but from the original thread: You can buy a set of 4 Moles.
It does irk me that they're labeled A-D and not Al-Zn.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 12:12 PM on September 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
It does irk me that they're labeled A-D and not Al-Zn.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 12:12 PM on September 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
Count me as one that does not think staples should count. (Neither does rice, or yeast, or mols of chemicals.) If you can't buy [insert very small number, such as 10, or 50 maybe] of something anywhere, in any store, then buying a million of that item doesn't count for this game. Under strict rules this game might even be to buy a million of something that you could, under normal circumstances, buy just one of.
(Which means those barrels of oil would still win, I believe? Is it possible to ever buy one barrel of oil in the normal course of events? I'm betting survivalists buy a single barrel of oil for their bunkers all the time...?)
I'm really sorry I can't seem to help being a pedant about these things.
posted by MiraK at 12:28 PM on September 16, 2021
(Which means those barrels of oil would still win, I believe? Is it possible to ever buy one barrel of oil in the normal course of events? I'm betting survivalists buy a single barrel of oil for their bunkers all the time...?)
I'm really sorry I can't seem to help being a pedant about these things.
posted by MiraK at 12:28 PM on September 16, 2021
When I was a kid, my uncle worked in a marble factory for a while and he would bring me these mesh bags containing 50 marbles, which, he said, were sold wholesale for 0.50 Indian Rupees back in 1990.
1 USD was 17.5 INR in 1990.
So a bag of 50 marbles back in 1990 cost 0.028 USD. Meaning ...
Damn it.
That's still $560 dollars for a million marbles, in 1990 dollars too. Ugh. A million is too fucking many.
posted by MiraK at 12:37 PM on September 16, 2021 [3 favorites]
1 USD was 17.5 INR in 1990.
So a bag of 50 marbles back in 1990 cost 0.028 USD. Meaning ...
Damn it.
That's still $560 dollars for a million marbles, in 1990 dollars too. Ugh. A million is too fucking many.
posted by MiraK at 12:37 PM on September 16, 2021 [3 favorites]
The current record is £5.21 ($7.18) for 1,000,000 styrofoam balls.
Would love to see if someone can get lower than that. Solder balls seem a good option, but it's hard to find a suppler that will sell you exactly a million!
posted by jontyw at 12:43 PM on September 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
Would love to see if someone can get lower than that. Solder balls seem a good option, but it's hard to find a suppler that will sell you exactly a million!
posted by jontyw at 12:43 PM on September 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
I have to suspect that there's a point where the cost of 'one' of some thing becomes so low that it's simply easier to sell that thing by weight or volume, rather than going to the trouble of counting them out individually and packaging them for sale that way.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 1:20 PM on September 16, 2021
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 1:20 PM on September 16, 2021
Hard disk drives are definitely sold by number of bytes of available storage, not by weight or volume. Just sayin.
posted by flabdablet at 1:37 PM on September 16, 2021
posted by flabdablet at 1:37 PM on September 16, 2021
So, what is the point here? Is it just a game? Or is it an attempt to visualize "one million" on the cheap? Styrofoam balls might work for the former, but the tolerances are probably too loose for accuracy in the latter.
Assuming the second question: Solder balls may have the tolerances. They may be too small and light to be easily checkable, though.
Pennies are an option. There are simple machines especially designed to count them, so accuracy is easy. While--as noted above--it would take $10,000 worth, many people have a bunch socked away and may be willing to donate them (especially, e.g., for a school project) Unfortunately getting enough may still be difficult. (Also, a million pennies would weigh 2.5 metric tonnes.)
Staples should be good (at least the same size from the same manufacturer) and a jig might be rigged up to check a sleeve (~200) or more at a time.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 1:50 PM on September 16, 2021
Assuming the second question: Solder balls may have the tolerances. They may be too small and light to be easily checkable, though.
Pennies are an option. There are simple machines especially designed to count them, so accuracy is easy. While--as noted above--it would take $10,000 worth, many people have a bunch socked away and may be willing to donate them (especially, e.g., for a school project) Unfortunately getting enough may still be difficult. (Also, a million pennies would weigh 2.5 metric tonnes.)
Staples should be good (at least the same size from the same manufacturer) and a jig might be rigged up to check a sleeve (~200) or more at a time.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 1:50 PM on September 16, 2021
The smallest, cheapest bottle of probiotics advertising > 1 million live cultures in each tablet.
posted by iamkimiam at 2:00 PM on September 16, 2021
posted by iamkimiam at 2:00 PM on September 16, 2021
Like many of my million fellow lemmings, I think I misread the rules.
posted by iamkimiam at 2:03 PM on September 16, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by iamkimiam at 2:03 PM on September 16, 2021 [2 favorites]
I have 80,000 pennies in a bowl in my shop, if that helps anyone. I was going to do a floor with them, and who knows, if I ever actually do anything ever again, maybe it will still happen.
posted by maxwelton at 2:24 PM on September 16, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by maxwelton at 2:24 PM on September 16, 2021 [2 favorites]
Yeah, obviously it's a silly pointless game, so one can interpret the rules however you like. I like interpreting this as things that have actually been enumerated in some way, so for example if the 200,000 styrofoam balls are dispensed into the packaging by weight, that doesn't count (so to speak). That's why my mind went first to small electronic components, as I know those are often actually "counted" out into their packaging. On the other hand, at very large volumes, maybe they use tape packaging, and dispense by cutting a specified length instead of enumerating... hm...
posted by biogeo at 2:31 PM on September 16, 2021
posted by biogeo at 2:31 PM on September 16, 2021
a pile of free staples
Great sockpuppet account name here up for grabs.
posted by biogeo at 2:33 PM on September 16, 2021 [3 favorites]
Where can I order a thousand plates of a thousand beans?
posted by Foosnark at 3:13 PM on September 16, 2021 [9 favorites]
posted by Foosnark at 3:13 PM on September 16, 2021 [9 favorites]
a pile of free staples
Great sockpuppet account name here up for grabs.
Thanks!
posted by grateful at 3:40 PM on September 16, 2021 [2 favorites]
Great sockpuppet account name here up for grabs.
Thanks!
posted by grateful at 3:40 PM on September 16, 2021 [2 favorites]
I nominate roll tickets for the "cheapest million things that can be bought individually". For $1,700, you can get a million $5 tickets, for a discount of $4.998 million off of face value.
posted by ectabo at 4:55 PM on September 16, 2021
posted by ectabo at 4:55 PM on September 16, 2021
How many gametes in 10cc, basically for research...
posted by halfbuckaroo at 5:28 PM on September 16, 2021
posted by halfbuckaroo at 5:28 PM on September 16, 2021
You could buy 100 reels of 10,000 chip resistors for $880: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/viking-tech/AS02JTE0180/13681512.
Unit price is $0.00088
posted by coberh at 5:34 PM on September 16, 2021
Unit price is $0.00088
posted by coberh at 5:34 PM on September 16, 2021
>How many gametes in 10cc, basically for research...
$20. Same as in town.
posted by onehalfjunco at 5:45 PM on September 16, 2021 [2 favorites]
$20. Same as in town.
posted by onehalfjunco at 5:45 PM on September 16, 2021 [2 favorites]
For visualization, consider 2mm Chrome Steel Ball Bearings G25 - Pack of 10000 * 10 @ $26.60 = $2660.00
Not the cheapest thing, but they're big enough to be seen and very uniform. They weigh just enough (0.033 Grams) to be verifiable on a pretty cheap scale.
A million of those placed end to end would be 2,000 meters (about 1.25 miles.) For comparison, the Eiffel Tower is 324 meters high and the Empire State Building is 443m to the tip of its antenna mast. This is the most difficult part of visualizing a million.†
If you take those same bbs and formed them‡ into a square, it'd be just two meters (~6.5') on a side.
If you formed them‡ into a cube, it'd be 20 centimeters (~7 3/4") on a side.
Assuming, of course, I didn't screw up the math.
† Even a million office staples, at about 3 per millimeter, would be Eiffel sized if laid end-to-end.
‡ E.g., with plexiglass sheets.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 5:51 PM on September 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
Not the cheapest thing, but they're big enough to be seen and very uniform. They weigh just enough (0.033 Grams) to be verifiable on a pretty cheap scale.
A million of those placed end to end would be 2,000 meters (about 1.25 miles.) For comparison, the Eiffel Tower is 324 meters high and the Empire State Building is 443m to the tip of its antenna mast. This is the most difficult part of visualizing a million.†
If you take those same bbs and formed them‡ into a square, it'd be just two meters (~6.5') on a side.
If you formed them‡ into a cube, it'd be 20 centimeters (~7 3/4") on a side.
Assuming, of course, I didn't screw up the math.
† Even a million office staples, at about 3 per millimeter, would be Eiffel sized if laid end-to-end.
‡ E.g., with plexiglass sheets.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 5:51 PM on September 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
There’s a homepage that’ll sell you a million pixels for one million dollars.
posted by romanb at 6:40 PM on September 16, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by romanb at 6:40 PM on September 16, 2021 [2 favorites]
Aliexpress searches for "10000 pcs" and "1000 pcs":
Initially waterballs, 10,000 for ~CAD$1.
posted by sebastienbailard at 7:09 PM on September 16, 2021
Initially waterballs, 10,000 for ~CAD$1.
posted by sebastienbailard at 7:09 PM on September 16, 2021
Beads are more expensive than I thought! There's 'Quefe 44000pcs 2mm 12/0 Bracelet Glass Seed Beads, 48 Colors Small Beads, Craft Beads kit for Jewelry Making' for $12 on Amazon, so it would cost about $272 to reach 1M.
posted by of strange foe at 8:21 PM on September 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by of strange foe at 8:21 PM on September 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
Imagine wearing (almost) a million beads on a wedding dress. Stand up -- yeah. Walk down the aisle -- maybe you need some strong bridesmaids to heft that train. Or maybe treat the train like a parade float, with its own flatbed trailer.
posted by TrishaU at 8:38 PM on September 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by TrishaU at 8:38 PM on September 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
Thanks!
posted by grateful at 6:40 PM on September 16
eponymous
posted by AsYouKnow Bob at 10:28 PM on September 16, 2021
posted by grateful at 6:40 PM on September 16
eponymous
posted by AsYouKnow Bob at 10:28 PM on September 16, 2021
Do you want Fimbulvetr? Because that's how you get Fimbulvetr.
More specifically, this is how Naglfar sets sail.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 11:25 PM on September 16, 2021 [2 favorites]
More specifically, this is how Naglfar sets sail.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 11:25 PM on September 16, 2021 [2 favorites]
I was going to do a floor with them, and who knows, if I ever actually do anything ever again, maybe it will still happen.
Ok total derail from a thousand plates of beans just in case anyone needs this information: never, ever do this. Trust me. And especially never do it to a bathroom.
I've seen a couple of penny-tiled floors, including one in a bathroom in a bar and it's a really bad idea for a number of surprising reasons.
Besides all of the obvious problems like how much labor it takes to lay that many pennies as tiles - or even worse, to try to remove them and oh dear ask me how I know - there's a thing that happens electrochemically with that many pennies all lined up like that where it basically makes a big, gross galvanic zinc-copper battery that starts to corrode and destroy itself and basically any paint or sealant you can put on it and attacks almost everything around it.
I suspect it's less of a problem with, say, a fully encapsulated resin or epoxy casting for a tabletop but floors, walls and other structural surfaces I've seen tiled in pennies always ended up just totally gross, crumbly and somehow filled with dirt and crud and were almost impossible to clean.
Part of the problem seems to be in the mix of different kinds of pennies, particularly newer mostly zinc pennies that have only the thinnest copper jacket.
I think if you did a penny floor tiling project with entirely with vintage and 100% copper pennies it might be less gross and would form a nice patina. But these days if you have that many all copper pennies you'd be better off melting them for scrap and buying some copper sheeting or tiles.
In the case of the bar bathroom, well, as one can imagine horrible things happened to that floor. It did some weird things chemically in the presence and exposure of so much urine, water and whatever else going on that it developed some really interesting and rather permanent odors that no amount of industrial mopping could clear out.
Let's put it this way for perspective: I've done some really gross work. I'm the farthest thing from a germaphobe. I've been inside sewage cisterns and septic tanks.
And scraping up that damn penny floor was one of the grossest and least pleasant things I've ever done as far as dirty work is concerned. It would have been easier to tear out actual tile floors and less disgusting to scrape up some crusty old dive bar vinyl bathroom floor.
Tiling with pennies is definitely one of those ideas that sounds really cool and crafty until you actually do it and have to live with it.
posted by loquacious at 12:17 AM on September 17, 2021 [19 favorites]
Ok total derail from a thousand plates of beans just in case anyone needs this information: never, ever do this. Trust me. And especially never do it to a bathroom.
I've seen a couple of penny-tiled floors, including one in a bathroom in a bar and it's a really bad idea for a number of surprising reasons.
Besides all of the obvious problems like how much labor it takes to lay that many pennies as tiles - or even worse, to try to remove them and oh dear ask me how I know - there's a thing that happens electrochemically with that many pennies all lined up like that where it basically makes a big, gross galvanic zinc-copper battery that starts to corrode and destroy itself and basically any paint or sealant you can put on it and attacks almost everything around it.
I suspect it's less of a problem with, say, a fully encapsulated resin or epoxy casting for a tabletop but floors, walls and other structural surfaces I've seen tiled in pennies always ended up just totally gross, crumbly and somehow filled with dirt and crud and were almost impossible to clean.
Part of the problem seems to be in the mix of different kinds of pennies, particularly newer mostly zinc pennies that have only the thinnest copper jacket.
I think if you did a penny floor tiling project with entirely with vintage and 100% copper pennies it might be less gross and would form a nice patina. But these days if you have that many all copper pennies you'd be better off melting them for scrap and buying some copper sheeting or tiles.
In the case of the bar bathroom, well, as one can imagine horrible things happened to that floor. It did some weird things chemically in the presence and exposure of so much urine, water and whatever else going on that it developed some really interesting and rather permanent odors that no amount of industrial mopping could clear out.
Let's put it this way for perspective: I've done some really gross work. I'm the farthest thing from a germaphobe. I've been inside sewage cisterns and septic tanks.
And scraping up that damn penny floor was one of the grossest and least pleasant things I've ever done as far as dirty work is concerned. It would have been easier to tear out actual tile floors and less disgusting to scrape up some crusty old dive bar vinyl bathroom floor.
Tiling with pennies is definitely one of those ideas that sounds really cool and crafty until you actually do it and have to live with it.
posted by loquacious at 12:17 AM on September 17, 2021 [19 favorites]
Dorothy Parker "If all the girls who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn't be a bit surprised"
posted by BobTheScientist at 1:05 AM on September 17, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by BobTheScientist at 1:05 AM on September 17, 2021 [2 favorites]
>The current record is £5.21 ($7.18) for 1,000,000 styrofoam balls.
Don't want to burst anyone's bubble here,* but a quick calculation shows that 200,000 3mm styrofoam balls, which is what they say they will send you for $1.77, would fill a volume of about 4-5 liters.
So, that is a LOT more than the little bag they are showing on the web site. That looks like a 1 liter bag, so you're looking at 33-ish of those bags to hold your 200,000 styrofoam balls.
Also they say the weight of 200,000 of the balls is 15 grams. Which, er, no.
33 liters filled with anything, even styrofoam balls, is going to weigh a good bit more than 15 grams.
I mean, a good sized pat of butter if 15 grams. Two tablespoons of (popped) popcorn is 15 grams. Hell, the bag they are shipping the things in is going to be the better part of 15 grams - and remember it's going to take like 33 of those, plus or minus, to hold an actual 200,000 balls, so it's going to come out somewhere north of 200 grams just for the bags.
See, what it comes down to, is someone here doesn't have a good grasp of how much a million is (or 100,000 or 200,000 in this case - that should be 5-10X easier, but we're still failing).
They have managed to misplace a decimal point or two and they didn't even notice.
Anyway, I'm going to say this doesn't win - not because it's impossible to get a million of these styrofoam balls, but because the cost is going to be a LOT more than 5 X $1.77.
33 X 5 X $1.77 is more like $292.
To solve this, you can get them in 500g lots (example) and save some $$$ there but now it is no different than buying rice or wheat grains or whatever.
You can estimate the number in a given mass (with or without correct usage of decimal places) but no one, and not even any machine, is sitting there counting out 1,000,000 or even 100,000 or 10,000 or 1,000 of these.
This puts them in the same category as rice or beans or wheat grains or salt crystals or whatever. You can get a decent estimate of how many per KG and then get the appropriate number of KG. But no one is COUNTING them.
The styrofoam balls, clearly are selling by the gram, not by the count. AND on top of that, getting a million of them is going to cost a lot more than $5 or $10.
BZzzt.
* Sorry if I have crushed anyone's happy time dreaming about very very small styrofoam balls
** The assumption there is "random sphere packing," which is a reasonable one for a bunch of small spheres dumped into some bags, and has a sphere packing efficiency of about 64%.
Beyond that it is just calculating the volume filled by 200,000 spheres with diameter 3mm.
posted by flug at 1:52 AM on September 17, 2021 [5 favorites]
Don't want to burst anyone's bubble here,* but a quick calculation shows that 200,000 3mm styrofoam balls, which is what they say they will send you for $1.77, would fill a volume of about 4-5 liters.
So, that is a LOT more than the little bag they are showing on the web site. That looks like a 1 liter bag, so you're looking at 33-ish of those bags to hold your 200,000 styrofoam balls.
Also they say the weight of 200,000 of the balls is 15 grams. Which, er, no.
33 liters filled with anything, even styrofoam balls, is going to weigh a good bit more than 15 grams.
I mean, a good sized pat of butter if 15 grams. Two tablespoons of (popped) popcorn is 15 grams. Hell, the bag they are shipping the things in is going to be the better part of 15 grams - and remember it's going to take like 33 of those, plus or minus, to hold an actual 200,000 balls, so it's going to come out somewhere north of 200 grams just for the bags.
See, what it comes down to, is someone here doesn't have a good grasp of how much a million is (or 100,000 or 200,000 in this case - that should be 5-10X easier, but we're still failing).
They have managed to misplace a decimal point or two and they didn't even notice.
Anyway, I'm going to say this doesn't win - not because it's impossible to get a million of these styrofoam balls, but because the cost is going to be a LOT more than 5 X $1.77.
33 X 5 X $1.77 is more like $292.
To solve this, you can get them in 500g lots (example) and save some $$$ there but now it is no different than buying rice or wheat grains or whatever.
You can estimate the number in a given mass (with or without correct usage of decimal places) but no one, and not even any machine, is sitting there counting out 1,000,000 or even 100,000 or 10,000 or 1,000 of these.
This puts them in the same category as rice or beans or wheat grains or salt crystals or whatever. You can get a decent estimate of how many per KG and then get the appropriate number of KG. But no one is COUNTING them.
The styrofoam balls, clearly are selling by the gram, not by the count. AND on top of that, getting a million of them is going to cost a lot more than $5 or $10.
BZzzt.
* Sorry if I have crushed anyone's happy time dreaming about very very small styrofoam balls
** The assumption there is "random sphere packing," which is a reasonable one for a bunch of small spheres dumped into some bags, and has a sphere packing efficiency of about 64%.
Beyond that it is just calculating the volume filled by 200,000 spheres with diameter 3mm.
posted by flug at 1:52 AM on September 17, 2021 [5 favorites]
> 33 X 5 X $1.77 is more like $292.
Oops, the calculation is 4.4 (liters) X 5 (because you'll need 5 X 200000 to make a million) X $1.77 which is about $39.
So, still pretty good but not $7 and also, not an exact count of one million by any means.
posted by flug at 2:00 AM on September 17, 2021 [2 favorites]
Oops, the calculation is 4.4 (liters) X 5 (because you'll need 5 X 200000 to make a million) X $1.77 which is about $39.
So, still pretty good but not $7 and also, not an exact count of one million by any means.
posted by flug at 2:00 AM on September 17, 2021 [2 favorites]
Sounds like a situation where the combination of emulsion microreactors e.g. and flow cytometery should be applicable..
Need exactly 10^6 tiny spheres? We can do that…You’d obviously need enough people wanting exact counts of essentially useless things to amortise the equipment costs, but the marginal cost of production should be tiny.
posted by memetoclast at 5:17 AM on September 17, 2021 [2 favorites]
Need exactly 10^6 tiny spheres? We can do that…You’d obviously need enough people wanting exact counts of essentially useless things to amortise the equipment costs, but the marginal cost of production should be tiny.
posted by memetoclast at 5:17 AM on September 17, 2021 [2 favorites]
exact counts of essentially useless things
This thread is a gold mine of excellent sockpuppet account names.
posted by biogeo at 1:31 PM on September 17, 2021 [3 favorites]
excellent sockpuppet
Thanks, there's another.
posted by loquacious at 6:56 PM on September 17, 2021 [3 favorites]
Thanks, there's another.
posted by loquacious at 6:56 PM on September 17, 2021 [3 favorites]
However for fucks to give on the other hand, even one is priceless.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 10:04 PM on September 19, 2021
posted by St. Peepsburg at 10:04 PM on September 19, 2021
In Cheaper by the Dozen (or its sequel - I can't remember which) the Gilbreth children describe how their father, efficiency expert Frank Bunker Gilbreth, decided that the children needed to learn the concept of one million. So he took a large sheet of drafting paper, hand-ruled a 1,000 x 1,000 line grid on it, and hung it up in the living room. THAT'S dedication!
And just like that, at age 55, I can suddenly see a million in my mind's eye.
posted by Orlop at 9:02 AM on September 21, 2021
And just like that, at age 55, I can suddenly see a million in my mind's eye.
posted by Orlop at 9:02 AM on September 21, 2021
So he took a large sheet of drafting paper, hand-ruled a 1,000 x 1,000 line grid on it, and hung it up in the living room.
If you want another way to see a million, I just finished making a 5 part, 42 hour video series mapping over a million genetic variants.
To get exactly 1 million, you'll have to stop just before 4:16:20 of the 4th video.
I should warn you that it's pretty boring and very long.
posted by clawsoon at 1:40 PM on October 3, 2021
If you want another way to see a million, I just finished making a 5 part, 42 hour video series mapping over a million genetic variants.
To get exactly 1 million, you'll have to stop just before 4:16:20 of the 4th video.
I should warn you that it's pretty boring and very long.
posted by clawsoon at 1:40 PM on October 3, 2021
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posted by bondcliff at 7:01 AM on September 16, 2021 [2 favorites]