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Posted by c249709 3 days ago

The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million(calvin.sh)
1247 points | 473 commentspage 2
ticulatedspline 3 days ago|
Seems silly at first but in retrospect isn't that surprising to construct from requirements:

1: we want a big cube

2: has to have a million dollars

3: should be stacked neatly.

Given the bills are so evenly arranged on the lower surface there's only so many squares you can produce with the bills like that. 8x19 or 6x17 . 6x17 is noted as close to 1 mill but they only remove 2 stacks from the 100 side. so now it's not a cube, you'd come under if you trimmed it down to a cube.

so stacked flat seems 8x19 is the smallest square you can make for one side for a cube of cash that fits mil. so they did that and just filled it up.

It might be hollow, there's certainly a void. There's some comments about the border but you can clearly see that the bills don't go behind the border so the corners are squared in, which means there's probably a weird void of some sort because it's not really a normal cube.

crazysim 3 days ago||
I wouldn't be surprised if the bills themselves are marked with specimen or something on the non-visible side. Maybe they're also artificially worn bills produced during bringup or testing.
burnt-resistor 3 days ago||
I agree. The "money" probably has the shape and appearance of money, but isn't legal tender out of concern risk management and theft.

The cube is almost certainly hollow, to cut weight and cost.

It's the idea of what a cube of $1m would look like. It should at least fulfill that requirement faithfully.

nativeit 3 days ago||
Someone else had mentioned these were retired dollar bills (aka, otherwise headed to the incinerator) but I don't know the provenance of this information.
tantalor 3 days ago||
> “Hey so… we’re $550,400 over budget on the million-dollar cube project.”

The cube did not cost $1.5M+. These are decommissioned dollars diverted from the normal process. The Federal Reserve is responsible for destroying currency. These bills are worthless. The only expense here is building the walls of the cube.

coldtea 2 days ago||
Or the counting is off...
msowers77 3 days ago||
I think I saw this cube back in the day, or one like it. I worked at a place called Coin Wrap and we handled sorting and wrapping money for banks, and also wrapped the Sacagawea coins when they came out. One of the trucks came through and had to offload this large cube of money they told us contained 1 million in dollar bills, so they could offload the pallets of coins behind it. I've told people about it but had not seen a picture or knew it was in the Chicago Fed building.
Evidlo 2 days ago||
Something on this blog post is spiking my cpu to 100%. Any idea?

Edit: it seems to be that video embed

dwighttk 2 days ago||
Inflation
Scarblac 3 days ago||
Well, if it contains 1.5 million, it also contains 1 million.
giancarlostoro 3 days ago||
Do we truly know if the Middle is all dollar bills and not filler?
mh- 3 days ago||
This felt like the most obvious explanation to me as well. Maybe the artist's vision for it was a solid cube of cash, but it ended up needing a structure inside to support the thing.

So many reasons this might be exactly $1,000,000 but not sum up on the outside.

That said, this is also something I would have spent way too much time overthinking, so I thoroughly enjoyed reading the blog post.

delfinom 3 days ago|||
Artist should have been fired. If I'm being shown a stack of $1 million, it better be a stack of 1 million of they are gonna be talking with the fishes.
giancarlostoro 3 days ago|||
Agree, I loved the post, but I also wonder if there's more nuance to it that we're unaware of.
jihadjihad 3 days ago|||
Not until Nicolas Cage gets involved.
lapetitejort 3 days ago||
We need to sneak a CT scanner, into the Fed...?
volemo 2 days ago||
Are there any "external"/"outwards" CT scanners? It'd have to somehow measure reflected radiation, I presume.
c249709 3 days ago|||
there's only one way to find out
aetherson 3 days ago||
Hacker News heist plan initiated.
Nextgrid 3 days ago|||
For scientific purposes only obviously.
volemo 2 days ago||
We'll count it and give it back. Promise.
m-hodges 3 days ago||
Did you read the article?

> What if it’s hollow? You can only see the outer stacks. For all we know, the middle is just air and crumpled-up old newspaper. A money shell. A decorative cube. A fiscal illusion. The world’s most expensive piñata (but don’t hit it, security is watching).

Feuilles_Mortes 3 days ago|
Instead of writing the counting tool he could have used the Multi-Point Tool in ImageJ [1] [2]. I used it just this morning for counting some embryos I collected.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhFNiPsVRoM

[2] https://fiji.sc/

Dilettante_ 3 days ago||
>I used it just this morning for counting some embryos I collected

"Sentences that flashbang people not in biology"

__float 3 days ago|||
It sounds like this may have been one of the pieces of software the author intentionally chose not to use:

> There are some clunky old Windows programs, niche scientific tools, and image analysis software that assumes you’re trying to count cells under a microscope...

volemo 2 days ago|||
I just use Inkscape to place dots on the objects and then select all to see the amount. Beware of off by one error! ;)
0cf8612b2e1e 3 days ago||
Being a web tool is significantly lower friction. I will definitely look into self hosting a version of this I can use in the future.
adolph 3 days ago||
Here you go: https://ij.imjoy.io/
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