Bank Holiday Monday

I'm working as an IT Intern in a prop trading house this summer. The "prop" stands for proprietary, which means that we only trade company money, rather than trading for clients. Not that it makes the blindest bit of difference to the work I do, really, but in the interests of presenting a full story...

Some day I'll write a little more about what it is I actually do (although not that much, because even my relatively insignificant work is somewhat sensitive and not entirely conducive to being broadcast to the world). I mention it now purely to explain why I was working on a bank holiday - no rest for the wicked and all that (also most markets are open today...). Without wanting to get over-excited about the situation, working on a bank holiday is a novel experience. Take the above picture for example - normally that would be bumper to bumper all the way along where you can see in this picture.

More pressingly, I normally lock my bike in Trinity. This morning, no luck (even with my swipe card, which seemed a little odd, but then when do Trinity's swipe cards ever work?) Apparently the idea that someone might want to get in on a bank holiday was laughable enough that they didn't even bother opening the doors.

There's a beggar who normally sits right at the centre of the Seán O'Casey bridge (that'd be the picture below). Apparently even he took the day off. Plus side was that I didn't have to fight my way across (through crowds of people, that is - the beggar doesn't fight me every time I go across).

Finding a spot to lock my bike was rather a lot easier than I had thought it might be. I can probably just lock it in the office car park too, if I ask, but I like the walk in from Trinity, so it's only on mornings when Trinity is inexplicably closed that it's an issue. Anyway, parking was found:

And when I did make it in, at the still unearthly hour of 8:30am, there was a cooked breakfast waiting for me. Nice one, SIG! Of course, along with all the other free food, I'm sure my health and general fitness levels are suffering as a result of this, but sure I'm only there 3 months. How much long term damage can I really do?

In a topical segue before I end the post, BBC drew my attention today to the whole American Billion v European Billion thing. What with the whole "debt crisis" this is suddenly relevant, for possibly the first time ever. I always felt that the US billion (1,000 million) made more sense, given that powers of three seem a sensible way to count up (thousand, million, billion...). This annoyed me as a general point of principle - on some tribal level I like to feel that us Europeans are always right about this sort of thing. I was delighted, then, to read today the rather obvious point that billion is literally bi-million, or a million million. From that point of view the European billion (being a million million) is correct whereas the American billion (a thousand million) is just silly.

Apparently the American billion should actually be called a sesquillion (literally meaning "to the power of one and a half"), which is also kinda more satisfying to say (apparently it's where the slang 'squillion' comes from). A trillion, in America a million million, should actually be a million million million (that's 18 zeroes, for anyone who's counting). Scientific notation starts to make a lot more sense at this level, obviously, but be that as it may I really don't see us turning our backs on millions, billions and trillions any time soon.

Thought for the day: It's more than conceivable that sesquillion may be my new favourite word.