Every fall, Google Canada holds a multi-week series of talks internally, called "Canada PD Days". People can sign up to give talks about any topic, whether it is work-related or not, although most of them are work-related. In 2021, I gave a fun talk about photographing birds. In 2022, I gave a more serious talk about the history of the x64 architecture, assembly language, and x64 calling conventions.

This year I decided to give another fun talk about "numbers". It was a modified version of a Lunch & Learn presentation that I gave at Imagine Communications one time. I covered a bunch of different types of numbers, small numbers, and large numbers, and talked about how many numbers there are.

For some of the small numbers, I wanted to give real-world examples that were as close as possible to the numbers I was discussing. In this case, I was talking about Googol, which is 10^100. To put that into perspective, the number of planck volumes (the smallest possible unit of space that we can describe with physics) in the observable universe is 10^186, so technically a Googol fits well within our universe. However, the number of possible combinations of a 9x9x9 Rubik's Cube is 10^277, which in some way is almost a Googol times larger than the amount of space in our universe.

As a fun prop for the talk, I put my 9x9x9 Rubik's Cube into this configuration, which is but one of the 10^277 possible combinations it could be in.

Technical Details: This photo was taken with my Pixel 6.