This little gem is # 10….

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On Monday, the Zimbabwe government introduced the 100 billion Zimbabwe dollar note (for the uninitiated, a billion has nine zeros). So far this year, the country ravaged by hyperinflation has been forced to print 100-million, 250-million and 500-million notes in rapid succession. All of them are now almost worthless. It has become common now for Zimbabweans to talk of their daily expenses in trillions (one trillion has 12 zeros).

Only last week, the Harare Herald advertised the Lotto bonanza prize being offered was 1.2 quadrillion Zimbabwean dollars. At the time, that was equivalent to around 4,000 US dollars. Tills throughout the country have been struggling to cope, as have banking computers, and accounting systems. As a result, the banks recently agreed to lop six zeros off transactions and documentation. Economist John Robertson predicts that within a month they will be forced to drop another three.

In Yugoslavia, for example, the rate of inflation was five quadrillion per cent between October 1993 and January 1994. The government was forced to issue a 500 billion dinar note in 1993.

In Germany after World War I, prices were doubling about every two days and workers were paid daily or more often with bundles of cash. The highest value banknote issued by the Reichsbank had a face value of 100 trillion marks.

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Yup…It’s exactly what you think it is…..little fish eating the dead skin off of your feet…. for $50.00 US per hour.

UMMM… HMMM…..weeelllll….I’m not too sure about this …..

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This ancient Egyptian sculpture resembles someone, but I can’t quite put my finger on who it is.

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In the ongoing $1 billion legal lawsuit between YouTube and Viacom, a federal judge has recently ordered Google to turn over records of all users and videos ever viewed on YouTube. Privacy concern aside, that’s 12 terabytes of data.

12 terabytes of data are roughly equivalent to:

- 5,280,000,000 single-spaced typewritten pages
- 1, 006,633 phone books
- 19,358 regular compact discs
- 2,614.5 DVDs
- 61.4 average-sized hard disks (200 GB)
- 9.6 human brains (the capacity of a human being’s functional memory is estimated to be 1.25 terabytes by futurist Raymond Kurzweil in The Singularity Is Near)
- all the data from Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope

I don’t know the details of the legal order, but it seems that if information is information, then Google should just hand over the data in 5 billion sheets of single-spaced typewritten page. Comic sans font. IN CAPS!!

Some of these are really funny. Check out the link here.

And this…

and this…

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After a fun day of swimming at my parents house I came across these clips of other people having not as much fun….

Last year, New York police officers were seen dancing in the streets just before arresting four men in a city nightclub on charges of selling $100 worth of cocaine.  It took six months and the men’s life savings, but their names were finally cleared when prosecutors took the unusual step of announcing in court that the men had committed no crime.

That’s because club surveillance video shows that the undercover cops had no contact with the accused men in the two hours they were in the club.

Now, club owner Eduardo Espinoza says the police are retaliating against him.

Espinoza said he thinks police are retaliating against him because of a strange phone call he received shortly before the harassment began.

A man who identified himself as the officer who made the drug arrest in his club demanded to know if Espinoza had taped the events of that night.

“I said I already gave it to the defendants,” Espinoza said, “He said, ‘Oh s–t.’ He hung up.”

Espinoza had received just two summonses in the two-and-a-half years he owned the club prior to turning over the videotapes.  He has received more than a dozen since.

“I been harassed so much, I’m selling my business,” said Espinoza, owner of Delicias de Mi Tierra on 91st Place in Elmhurst.

“Every two to three weeks, there’s cops in here, searching the bar. If there’s no violation, they’ll make it up. I lost all my clients - everybody’s scared to come in my place right now.”

The officers implicated by the surveillance tapes are being investigated, but still on duty.