The Story about A Dollar (that US Dollar). "Abby Technology", Auckland

Pull a buck from your wallet now and prepare to be amazed.  http://tiny.cc/usdollar


We’re serious. Did you know a dollar bill has hidden pictures, flecks of color, and mysterious symbols? And that’s just the beginning. What do all those seemingly random letters and Latin phrases mean, anyway?


The Basics: How much is a dollar worth?

The question seems simple, but the answer is quite complex. Since 1973, the dollar bill has had no value tied to it. You cannot trade in a dollar to the government for gold, silver, or any other commodity. The value of the nation's currency is related to the decree by the government that a dollar is legal tender for all debts. This means if someone attempts to pay a debt using dollars, the person being paid must accept the money or the law no longer recognizes the debt. This is important enough that the phrase is printed on every bill the government creates.


It is also vital for the nation's citizens to agree that the bills have value. If the members of a society decided that they did not believe in the currency, it would quickly be worth no more than the paper it is printed on. For the record, each bill costs the government 6.4 cents to print.


What kind of paper are the bills made from?


Bills are made from a blend of linen and cotton, which is why they don't fall apart in the wash the way paper does. If you look closely, you can see red and blue silk fibers woven throughout the bill. The threads are thought to be an anti-counterfeit measure.


Hint: Look in the white spaces on the face of the bill for little bits of the colored thread. They look like lint but you can't scratch them off!


On the face of a dollar, what does the letter inside the circular seal mean?

The black seal with the big letter in the middle signifies the Federal Reserve bank that placed the order for the bill. A = Boston, B = New York City, C = Philadelphia, D = Cleveland, E = Richmond, Va., F = Atlanta, G = Chicago, H = St. Louis, I = Minneapolis, J = Kansas City, K = Dallas.


The letter also corresponds to the black number that is repeated four times on the face of the bill. For example, if you have a bill from Dallas with the letter K, then the number on the bill will be 11 because K is the eleventh letter in the alphabet.


Can you find any tiny owls or spiders hidden on the front of the bill?

Many people believe they can see a tiny owl (some say it is a spider) next to the large "1" on the upper right of the bill. If you look at the shield shape that surrounds that "1," the tiny owl rests on the top left corner.


More than likely, the markings are nothing, just a point where the webbed design of the border varies. That won't stop some people from associating the peculiar detail with Masonic symbols, or with more practical things, like anti-counterfeit measures.


The Great Seal of the United States


The green back of the dollar bill features the two sides of The Great Seal of the United States. The founding fathers approved its design in 1782. Ben Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson all had a hand in devising it. The seal provides great insight into the values of the newborn nation and, like the Constitution, provides a direct link to its formative days.


What does Annuit Coeptis mean?


The first of three Latin phrases on the back of the bill is translated as "God has favored our undertakings." Many founders, Franklin and George Washington among them, believed that God's will was behind the successful creation of the United States.


Beneath the pyramid, what does Novus Ordo Seclorum mean?


These Latin words mean "New order of the ages." Charles Thomson, a statesman involved in the design of The Great Seal of the United States, proposed the phrase to signify the beginning of what he called "the new American Era," which he said began in 1776 with the signing of the Declaration of Independence.


Why is MDCCLXXVI on the bottom of the pyramid?

The letters are Roman numerals for 1776. M is 1,000, D is 500, CC is 200, L is 50, XX is 20, VI is 6. Add the numerals on the pyramid together and you get the year 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was signed, and when the Novus Ordo Seclorum began.


Why is there an unfinished pyramid with a glowing eye?


Thomson explained the sturdy pyramid as a symbol of "strength and duration". He did not explain its unfinished state, but many believe it signified that our nation remained unfinished. The pyramid also stops at 13 steps, the number of the original colonies.


The "Eye of Providence" is a visual representation of the words Annuit Coeptis, and reinforces the founders' notion that God looked upon the endeavor of the new nation with favor. Many theorists mistakenly believe the symbolism of the eye is related to the Freemasons (a secret society whose members believed they were under the careful scrutiny of God), but the symbolism of the glowing eye is far older than any Freemason thinking. Scholars have traced versions of the symbol as far back as the ancient Egyptians.


What does E Pluribus Unum mean?


"Out of many, one." The 13 disparate colonies came together to form one nation.


Why a bald eagle? The founders wanted an animal native to America to be the new nation's symbol. In its talons the eagle holds arrows and olive branches, signifying war and peace.


Fun activities you and the kids can do with a dollar bill


Track your bills. Go to the website Where's George? and enter the serial number of the bill. If the bill has been in circulation long enough, you might be able to see where your bill has been as it travels from wallets to registers and back. After you enter your bills, check back later to see where they have gone.


Play dollar-bill poker. Each of you takes a dollar bill and examines the green serial numbers as if they were a hand of playing cards. Make your best poker hand and see who wins.

Where the Dollar $ Sign came from? Do you know? (facts, strange, academic, Auckland, "David Lim")

Today I found out where the dollar sign ($) comes from. http://tiny.cc/dollarsign

This symbol first showed up in the 1770s, appearing in documents of English-Americans who had business dealings with Spanish-Americans.  However, it wasn’t until the very early 1800s that it became popularized, around the same time as the first official U.S. dollars were being minted.  Previous to this, the symbol had already been in use as an abbreviation for names of Spanish currency, namely as an abbreviation for the Spanish peso “p”.

So how do you get from a “p” to the dollar sign, “$”?  When writing financial documents referring to pesos, it was common to abbreviate the peso, for instance, “1 peso” to “1 p”.  However, when pluralized, as in “1000 pesos”, it becomes “p^s“.  Now when writing up financial documents and having to write “p^s” numerous times, it started to become common among the English-American colonists to merge the “p” and the super scripted “s” as one.  The top half of this symbol then produces something looking very much like a double vertical lined dollar sign.  In an even further bout of laziness, it became common among the English-American colonists to write the “p” with just one downward stroke vertically slashing the “s”, thus the ‘$’.  In some of the earliest documents containing this short hand, it was common to see both the double slashed version as well as the single slashed version in the same document, referring to the same thing, the Spanish peso.

How then did this symbol that originally denoted pesos spread to also denote the U.S. dollar?  Around the same time the U.S. was minting its first dollar coins, in 1792, Spanish currency was extensively circulated in the U.S. and around the world.  In large part due to this, the U.S. chose to design the U.S. dollar coins to duplicate the Spanish coins, in terms of matching the material and weight, hence value (at the time, the coins were made of silver and valued after the price of silver).  Doing this allowed the U.S. coin to be exchanged for a peso in a 1 to 1 exchange.  Thus, it was natural to use the same symbol to denote the U.S. dollar as was used for the Spanish peso.

Bonus Factoids:

• One interesting thing to note here is that it was the English-American colonists who first started merging the “p^s“, which eventually formed the dollar sign.  So while the dollar sign was first referring to the peso, it was the English-Americans who “invented” the symbol.  This is only noteworthy because it explains why we write dollar based monetary sums as “$10″ instead of “10$”, as the Spanish-Americans would have written it.  Having the symbol proceed the numeric value was the common custom with the English pound and thus with the English-American colonists.
• You will also occasionally hear that the dollar sign actually comes from superimposing the “U” and “S” from United States on top of each other, but this is proven false in Cajori’s book, written in 1929, “History of Mathematical Notations Volume 2“;  here he references some of the earliest documents containing the “$” symbol, which not only were referring to the peso in terms of the usage in those documents, but preceded the United States, so named, and also preceded the U.S. dollar.
• Yet another popular incorrect theory held by many is that the dollar sign was derived from the “pieces of 8″ in the Spanish currency, with the 8 forming the “S” and the slash through it to denote currency.  But once again, the earliest documents using this symbol clearly show that it is derived and used interchangeably with the “p^s“, which denoted pesos, not the smaller coinage “pieces of 8″.
• The name ‘dollar’ derived from the word ‘thaler’ which is an abbreviation for the word “Joachimsthaler”, a coin type from the city of Joachimsthal (Jáchymov) in Bohemia, where some of the first such coins were minted in 1516.

Sources:

• Ask Oxford: Where Does the Dollar Sign Come From?
• A History of Mathematical Notations, Volume II: Notations Mainly in Higher Mathematics by Florian Cajori, Originally published 1929
• Origin of the Dollar Sign
• Thaler

Turning your Blog into a Money Making Machine: A Simple Guide

When I first started to blog in 2006, I had no idea my little venture would lead me to what [GAS] has become today. I’ve always blogued for fun, and initially, like most of you, I had no idea that money could be made out of the activity. The fact is, people can earn a living out of blogging, and do it quite easily (after a while). It only takes 4 things:


Knowledge

You have to know things that people will want to learn about and are going to be searching for. Answers to the simplest questions are your best bet. How to blog? How to recover your windows password? How to recover data out of damaged hard drive? Yes, 10′s of thousands of people are asking Google these questions everyday, so you want to give them your best answer right? You also have to be knowledgeable enough in all things web to set up a proper blog. Just starting a free blogspot account to regurgitate your thoughts will not be enough; it takes a lot more then that to turn a site into a resource that will be both informative and profitable.

Persistence

Making money out of blogging takes time. If you want to blog for a living, you must be ready to write new and innovative content consistently (as in 5 to 7 times a week) for many months until you start seeing the fruits of your labor coming in. Yes, there are some exception out there (John Chow is earning $7000 per month after only 6 months (edit: He’s at $30000 per month now!), but in most cases, most of you won’t see a penny before 5 or 6 months of hard work.

Exposure

If nobody is reading you, where will you get the visibility needed to attract advertisers? Who will click on your ads? The answer is simple: no one. Being a good blogger involves a lot more than writing great content, it’s also about having good virtual PR skills. You will have to invest a lot of your time reading and participating to conversations on other blogs, submitting your articles to social networking sites and building yourself a large network of like-minded bloggers. Making friends in the blogosphere is the key to success. Friends will link to your articles, put you in their blogroll and talk about you wherever they roam. You’ll also do the same for them, not only because doing this will be profitable to you, but also because you care about the success of everyone.

Some basic english-writing skills

Yes, I know, my english isn’t perfect, but blogs are the realm of the people. Some of them excel in writing, others don’t, but does this stop Google from indexing your pages? Absolutely not. Does it stop people from being interested in what you have to say, as long as you know what you’re writing about? Nope. English is the language of the Internet. If you want to maximize the exposition of your content as an independent blogger, you’ll have to write in English.

After having done all this, your blog will be ready to be monetized. One of the most important things to consider when adding revenue sources to your site is to diversify. Don’t put all your eggs in the same basket!  You need a good mix of “cost per click”, “Cost Per Mille” and “Cost per action” ads. Here’s a small definition of each term:

• Cost per click (CPC): Form of advertisement that pays you when someone clicks on it.
• Cost per Action (CPA): Form of advertisement that pays you when someone accomplishes an action (such as downloading a file or subscribing to a service)
• Cost per mille (CPM): Form of advertisement that pays you to display a banner, button or any other form of advertisement 1000 times.

Here is a quick list of advertising services we are using to monetize our blogs. Every single one of these programs has paid us in the past, so if you sign up to them, you won’t have to worry about whether you’re making a good choice or getting ripped off.

• Adsense: The Internet #1 money advertisement program. Allows you to display contextual ads on each pages of your site (CPC / CPA).
• Chitika Ads : Allows you to integrate contextual ads, links to products, or a shopping mall within you blog (CPC).
• Technorati Media: A CPM based advertisement network.
• Private advertisement deals: Selling ad space privately isn’t difficult when you receive a lot of traffic and have some good traffic and a decent technorati / alexa rank.

Here are a few other interesting ressources that will help you monetize your site:

• John Chow dot Com
• ProBlogger: helping bloggers earn money
• Performancing: Helping bloggers succeed
• ShoeMoney: Skills to pay the bills

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