Inability to visualize the scale of our national debt
With some needed brain-break time between recruiter calls, I wanted to visualize the national debt. Inspired by the NYT tree-map visualization of our next proposed budget , and unsatisfied with the "if the national debt was dollars it would encircle the earth X times " type of answer. I get it, it's big. Very big. But, how big? So I started out with a nice slider (now easy in HTML5) and a picture of a crisp new $100. (It's all about the benjamins!) Apply some exponential math to the slider, and whammo... I crashed my browser. No problem, rookie mistake and I'm just exploring, let's have some stacks of $10,000, the amount of a federal bundle of $100 bills. When the amount of images on the screen is too big, switch to the bundles. Problem solved, right? Wrong, browser crashed again. Er, ok. How about stacks of million dollars? Easy, some casino had a stack in a glass case and everyone took pictures. Stacks o...