Interesting iPad Encounter

I have a new iPad 3G. It's a great tool for consuming information -- an information appliance, if you will. It's definitely not a computer and I feel a bit dirty for buying one. (That's a post for a different day.)

Today, I want to tell you about an interesting encounter I had with my iPad over lunch. I'm a sucker for pizza, and Princeton has a particularly good Pizza place near CITP, Old World Pizza.

Here's how the encounter went:

[I'm sitting at the counter eating two pieces of pepperoni pizza and drinking a mini-limonata.]

Stranger: Oh, hey, is that thing connected to your computer at home?

Me: No.

Stranger: Oh, so that thing is a computer?

Me: No, it's not.

Stranger: Hmfh.

Me: It's an information appliance.

Stranger: Oh, that makes sense!

Me: Yeah, it's great for reading, listening to stuff, watching videos, etc.

Stranger: Neat, like iTunes?

Me: Yeah, like iTunes.

[We eat our pizza for a bit.]

Other Stranger: Hey man, [talking to Stranger] what did you want to know from the phone?

Stranger: How many acres were there in the Louisiana purchase.

Other Stranger: Oh yeah... [proceeds to look it up]

[I proceed to look it up too...]

Other Stranger: Oh, are you looking that up?

Me: Yeah.

Other Stranger: Cool, probably won't take you as long.

At this point, in a total of about 20 seconds, I open Wikipanion on the iPad, look up "Louisiana Purchase", find that it's 828,800 sq mi., copy that, paste it into Pcalc for iPad and convert it to 21.47 billion ares.

Me: About 21 billion.

Other Stranger: Yeah, I said billions.

Stranger: Wow. We got that for the equivalent of $11 million.

Other Stranger: That's a hell of a deal.

As part Hispano -- my decendents were in what is now New Mexico and Colorado before México existed -- this was particularly strange: two guys marveling at what they considered a real estate transaction which was an event of enormous historical proportion for the USA.

The astute will notice a few thihngs:

• I get the impression that "information appliance" is a useful and accessible name for this class of devices.

• I messed up and gave them the figure in ares instead of acres. I didn't know what an are is... so, I didn't notice I had misread the conversion; the correct answer is 530,432,000 acres.

• The real figure is about $15 million (according to Wikipedia), which includes some debt we forgave France.

• In 1803, $15 million was worth much more than $15 million now... using estimated consumer price index correction factors for 1803 of 0.052 from Robert Sahr, it turns out this was about $290 million, or about $0.50 per acre.