Friday, March 27, 2009

Ana's Picture Book of the Week

A Million Dots by Andrew Clemens, 2006 Simon & Schuster, 48 pages

There are indeed a million dots in the book, although the book states it would take over eleven days for the reader to actually count them! On each page one of the dot numbers is highlighted and a large illustration depicts what that number represents. For instance, dot number 265,000 represents the number of different kinds of moths and butterflies on earth, and dot number 615,100 represents the number of words in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Kids and adults alike will like this book. Interesting, fun facts aided by the colorful illustrations over the dots provide a way to better understand how much a million really is!

1 comment:

Dr. Thursday said...

Very interesting!

Another way of looking at it: if you have a laser printer that produces 300 dots per inch, and use margins of one half inch on a standard 8.5x11 sheet of paper, that would mean roughly every sixth dot was printed - which would look like a solid light gray rectangle.

To count them, at one dot per second, would take 11 days 13 hours 46 minutes and 40 seconds.
No, I didn't just work it out - computer guys like me need to know stuff like that - or that the year is 31,536,000 seconds long, or there are 168 hours in a week and 1440 minutes or 86,400 seconds in a day (all in the standard sense of such units, of course). It can be very handy to have such reference numbers with you.

Here's another fun oddity: pi seconds is roughly a nanocentury. (You ought to be able to tell that from what I've already noted!)