UnNews:NASA designs bigger calculator to figure out national debt

This article is part of UnNews, your source for up-to-the-picosecond misinformation.

2 October 2010

Cape Canaveral, Florida -- In the ongoing effort to predict the long-term effects of these rough economic times, NASA unveiled the newest in a long line of super-computing calculators.

The radical new TI Bubble borrows technology from HP's legendary calculator, the HP33, and is preferred by many engineers, scientists and students for its efficiency. RPN, which stands for Reverse Polish Notation, is HP's exclusive time-saving, consistent method by which even Polacks can enter and solve mathematical problems. Scientists were stunned at the sudden turn in efficiency and affordability when they replaced the chip with one featuring RCN (Reverse Chinese Notation).

"It's an absolute breakthrough," said NASA engineer Ralph Mingus. "Once my project manager pointed out that the Chinese are better at arithmetic, we ditched RPN." The success of this new machine is not just in the microchip, but the generously large display that will allow economists to input the ridiculously long strings of numbers associated with calculating the national debt. Amongst the many financial advisors and economists present at its unveiling was Alan Greenspan.

"My HP33 was nice," stated Greenspan, "but it was really frustrating only being able to enter 3000 zeroes and not being able to play that game where you ski as an 'X' trying to avoid ||||| and the sort. Not to mention easier to use than that 20-mile-long abacus we'd started on several years ago." Its other accomplishments include its ability to calculate the meaning of life, the universe and everything to 42.4963, dividing by zero and calculating the last digit of pi (which, to scientists' astonishment, was a lowercase 'e').

While the news of this new device means relief to stumped economists the world over, the $5 billion "Abacus Highway," which helped spur jobs for people living on I-95 from Melbourne to Vero Beach, has been abandoned until further notice.