Word: billions
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...professionals who decide where to invest Harvard's $1.4 billion endowment bring to their conference table information culled from corporate annual reports, investment journals, personal visits to companies, visits to foreign firms, even conversations with Harvard faculty members who know something about economics...
...apparently ended the legal troubles that had dogged Cornfeld for seven years since the fall of I.O.S., which he started in the 1950s and built into the world's largest offshore investment com bine. At its peak in the late 1960s, I.O.S. managed assets totaling more than $2 billion in mutual funds alone; armies of I.O.S. "reps" rang doorbells everywhere to persuade people to put their savings into one or another of I.O.S.'s 130 in vestment outlets. Cornfeld, a onetime social worker, proclaimed that "everyone can be a millionaire." As if to prove it, he lived...
Nowadays the commonest statistics about the world and the nation-from the megatonnages of the SALT debate to the dollars of the defense budget-tend to defeat the ordinary imagination. The world population is supposedly 4.2 billion. The nation's 3.N.P. is running at about $2.39 trillion. Washington debates whether defense spending will increase to as much as $122 billion (see cover story for an idea of the realities underlying the number). In truth, far smaller figures can overtax ordinary people, many of whom, after all, have trouble fathoming the weather service's temperature-humidity index...
...seems, found a hot spot in the vicinity of Jupiter that is 300 million to 400 million degrees centigrade. Later, Voyager II, going almost 45,000 m.p.h., came as close as 404,000 miles to Jupiter's cloud tops on its way to Uranus-some 1.6 billion miles out there. Science now has an electron microscope that can magnify 20 million times and so can photograph a particle with a diameter of about 4 billionths of an inch. Computers can do 80 million calculations a second (and ostensibly 6.9 trillion a day). Other recent news: a suspicion that...
...clear at just what magnitude (or diminutude) a number passes beyond the capacity of an ordinary person to grasp -that is, to picture the quantity. Yet obviously a great effort is required even to cope with what is symbolized by a billion. The proof lies in those familiar tormented illustrations that writers cook up in the hope of suggesting the amount of a billion: the 125-mile-high stack of dollar bills that would add up to about a billion, the airplane propeller turning around the clock at 2,400 r.p.m. that would fall short of spinning a billion times...