I recently read an essay by Chinua Achebe in which he described the difficulty humans have with visualising big numbers. The numberis a good example. Millions of people or dollars are regularly mentioned by politicians and journalists, to the point where they actually don't seem that impressively big a number any longer. Achebe counters this by saying, "I sometimes startled my students by telling them that it was not yet one millionsince Christ was on earth."A new book designed by Think Studio , Hendrik Hertzberg's, is another attempt to visualise this massive number. It has 1,000,000 dots, 5000 to a page, with notations showing various significant numbers. So that you canthe number made concrete.Here are some of the interior page spreads--click for big, readable versions.Thanks to Think's John Clifford for providing the interior page images.