The Powers of Ten: Video Response

Our response to the Powers of Ten video by Ray and Charles Eames focused on an artifact that there seems to be an infinite supply of, yet many deem worthless: the penny. While pennies don't work in parking meters or vending machines, and have even been crusaded against by some politicians, they are still valueable.

So what does this have to do with the powers of ten? Research shows that about 100,000,000,000 pennies have been lost (taken out of circulation) to sewage drains, trash cans, storage, etc. We looked at different values of this number by powers of ten: one penny, ten pennies, one hundred...to see just what these so called "nuisance" pennies could purchase. What if we hadn't wasted those hundred billion pennies?

Laura Kimmel, Jack Kennedy, Alex Pokas