9 Quintillion

We had March Madness at work, where people filled out brackets, gathered around, ate, and watched basketball on TV. A year ago, I could not have told you what a bracket is or what the seed number means... So while I was filling out the bracket, my coworker S informed me that I could join the Yahoo bracket too, and that the perfect bracket could win $1 million. I felt for sure that filling out the perfect bracket will be a lot easier than picking the lottery winning number. Just for the fun of it (I'm crazy, okay?), I looked up the odds of filling out the perfect bracket. I was wrong, in fact, not just wrong, I could not possibly be more wrong -- as it turned out, the odds of winning lottery jacket is 1 out 42.5 million and the odds of filling out the perfect bracket is, get this, 9 QUINTILLION. What is a quintillion, you may ask. A quintillion is 18 zeroes...

Check out the calculation at:

http://ask.yahoo.com/20060322.html

For more units that you have never heard of in your life:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/quintillion