Tag Archives: money

The New $100 Bill Will Have Thousands of Tiny Lenses Built In

by Aale Harry Posted on April 25, 2013

Photo: The US Treasury

As of October 8, a new $100 bill will be in circulation in the U.S. In an attempt to cut down on counterfeits, the Federal Reserve will add features such as a blue 3D security ribbon composed of thousands of tiny lenses and a disappearing Liberty Bell in an inkwell, USA Today reports.

The new bill is a bit late to arrive in Americans wallets. Originally, it was scheduled to be released in February 2011. But the Feds discovered an issue with unwanted wrinkles appearing in many of the notes, so they postponed its release indefinitely.

As for that blue security ribbon and its tiny lenses, the technology works by magnifying the objects underneath. When the bill is moved one way, whatever is underneath seems to move the opposite way. Though the $100 is the note most frequently targeted by counterfeiters, USA Today points out, it’s the last bill to undergo an upgrade to try and deter those fakes.

But as the Wall Street Journal points out, even with fancy new technology, the counterfeiters will likely find a way around the security measures. They always do. Ben Franklin himself lost sleep over this issue. He designed the country’s first bills, which immediately triggered a wealth of counterfeits despite his adding a “mysterious anticounterfeiting device.”

This was the so-called nature print, which consisted of an image of a leaf or leaves. It was extraordinarily lifelike, and with good reason. Franklin had devised a way of taking a plaster cast of the surface of a leaf. That in turn could be used to cast a lead plate that would be used to print the notes. Because every leaf was unique—with a complex web of veins of varying thickness—the notes were very difficult to counterfeit.

No surprise, though, the strategy didn’t work for very long. The British actually used counterfeits of Franklin’s bills as a means of undermining the impending war. While we’ve moved beyond Red Coat plots to crash the U.S. economy, as the Wall Street Journal writes, however many fancy security tactics are crammed onto a small slip of green paper, counterfeiters will eventually and inevitably crack that code.

Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition

by Myrna Posted on April 17, 2013

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Posted in EVOLVER EDITIONS | Tagged Age, and, books, ecology, economics, gift, in, money, nature, of, planet earth, Sacred, society, the, Transition | Comments Off

The Complete Compost Gardening Guide: Banner batches, grow heaps, comforter compost, and other amazing techniques for saving time and money, and … most flavorful, nutritous vegetables ever.

by Myrna Posted on April 15, 2013

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Posted in Storey Publishing, LLC | Tagged ..., Amazing, and, Banner, batches, books, comforter, complete, Compost, ecology, ever., flavorful, for, gardening, grow, Guide, heaps, money, Most, nature, nutritous, other, planet earth, saving, techniques, the, time, vegetables | Comments Off

Tracing $1 Bills Across the United States Is a Surprisingly Useful Hobby

by gammak Posted on March 25, 2013

Image: Prince Roy

In 1998, Hank Eskin started a website called WheresGeorge.com, dedicated to tracking dollar bills across the United States. Members of this club are called Georgers. They stamp dollar bills with their website, then search for and track those bills as they travel across the United States.

At NPR, Stan Alcorn caught up with some of these trackers. He writes:

[T]ypical Georgers log in religiously to enter their dollars’ serial numbers and ZIP codes before they stamp and spend them. If one gets entered a second time, the Georger gets an email. That’s called a “hit.”

Robert Rothenberg was sitting at the table in Kabooz’s when he got a hit in New Jersey. He gets a lot of hits, since he’s entered nearly 100,000 bills into the website’s database.

“I have a hit streak going since July of 2010, every day since then. I’m trying to get to 1,000 days, which will be the end of the month,” Rothenberg says.

Now, what started as a quirky hobby has turned into a national bill hunt that’s useful for all sorts of people—like physicists. Dirk Brockmann, a physicist at Northwestern University, writes at his website about meeting a cabinet maker in Vermont who tipped him off to the site:

After the conference I decided to visit Dennis Derryberry, an old friend from college who lives within driving distance to Montreal in the green mountains of Vermont, where he works as a cabinet maker. After a few hours on the highway Dennis and his family welcomed me to their beautiful house in the woods. During this visit Dennis, one of the most witty individuals I have ever met, asked me one evening on his porch while we were having a beer, “So Dirk, what are you working on?” – “I’m interested in the patterns that underly human travel,” I replied, and told him about my efforts to better understand human mobility and our goal of developing more quantitative models for the spread of epidemics. “It’s just amazingly difficult to compile all this data,” I explained. Dennis paused a while and then inquired, “Do you know this website www.wheresgeorge.com?”

From there, Brockmann has used the bills to study how networks move move and change, infectious diseases and all sorts of other things. Eskin, for one, is surprised at both the popularity and the usefulness of his little project. And when Georgers get together, it still feels like a small club. Here’s NPR again:

At Kabooz’s Bar and Grill at New York’s Penn Station, Jennifer Fishinger is covering her table in stacks of ones. There are 500 $1 bills laid out.

At the next table over, David Henry has his stacks of cash in plastic bags. They’re paper-clipped $1 bills in groups of 10.

If only everyone else’s little hobbies could do the same amount for science.