End to end and edge to edge

Robert and I cooked up this little project a few weeks ago, and only tonight worked on the math. Check us and see if we're right.

So, this required a little research. (edit - and, fortunately, I know a Canadian who helped me with the metric conversion error)

Iraq is 438,317 km² or 438,317,000,000 square centimeters (edited to correctly reflect cubic centimeter calculation)

A dollar bill is 156 mm by 66 mm by .11 mm, or 102.96 square centimeters (edited from 1029.6 centimeters, which I thought looked pretty big...)

We've spent $3,000,000,000 on Iraq according to the Washington Post.

If each of those dollars were laid flat across the land surface of Iraq, they would cover 3,088,800,000,000 square centimeters.

3,088,800,000,000 centimeters divided by 438,317,000,000 centimeters is .7046954601. (edited to correctly show relationship between smaller dollar size and larger Iraq size)

If we'd have just taken the cash, and laid it all end to end and edge to edge, we'd almost have covered the surface area of Iraq with dollar bills. (edited to allow for corrected math.)

Taken another way, the WaPo estimate is considered by many to be low, and is several months old. Pretty soon, we could conceptually have covered the entire country with dollar bills.

Thanks to Wikipedia for providing the measurements of Iraq and the US Dollar, and to Google for its most helpful up and down conversion function, and Excel for being able to take numbers over 100,000,000.

And, thanks to my favorite Canuckistanian, Eric in Vancouver, who provided me with this very helpful conversion:

Ya know D,

After going to bed, I thought of an easier way to calculate this without losing track of erroneous zeroes and to help you with imperial-vs.-metric measurements:

Let's start with 1 square metre. A metre is approximately the size of a yard (39" or so). A metre is 100 cm, so a SQUARE metre (approximate the size of a square yard) is is 100cm x 100cm or 10,000 square (NOT cubic) cm.

A square cm (a little under a half inch squared ) is about the size of a sugar cube.

By your measurements, it would take 103 to cover a dollar bill. Let's round it down slightly to 100, and add the 3% later.

A km (1.6 miles) is by definition 1,000 metres. So a square km is 1,000 x 1,000 metres or 1 million square metres.

So to cover a square km with dollar bills we need 100 (to cover a square metre) X 1 million, or 100 million of 'em.

10 (TEN) square km would therefore take ten hundred million (aka 1,000 million, aka a BILLION) singles to cover it.

Let's stick to 10 (TEN) square km needing a BILLION bills for now:

Iraq is 438,317 square km.

To cover it would therefore take 43, 831 BILLION dollar bills

That's also known as 43.831 TRILLION bills.

(Remember that 3% we rounded up a while ago? Let's take it off now to bring the 43.831 BILLION down to 42.5)

So to cover Iraq in dollar bills would take 42.5 TRILLION of them

At $4.25 Trillion spent, you could cover 1/10 of the country in dollar bills.

E.