Big, red measurement

Here’s one of those news facts that would be humorous — except that it isn’t.

Fact: The national debt is so huge, its numbers don’t even fit on a standard calculator.

That fact bothered Matt Miles, a Western Colorado developer. It meant that average Americans could not see the burden on their calculators — assuming they even wanted to.

But Mr. Miles thought they should see it. Seeing is believing. So he created a new calculator that can display the debt’s 16 digits: $11,792,918,170,836.43 as of the first of this month.

The calculator — dubbed “Big Red,” as in “red ink” — costs just four digits: $12.99 online.