Two examples of articles for Publish0x.
A Story Steve Jobs So Wanted To Be True
I was explained the origin of the original Apple logo, the one with the rainbow colours. It was a beautiful story, a perfect tribute to Alan Turing - the great gay mathematician who had laced an apple with cyanide and taken a bite, his suicide driven by society's oppression of homosexuality - after all, it was 1954.
Some years later, I discovered that Apple's perfect tribute to "the father of computer science" was indeed a classic myth. When asked Steve Jobs said “it isn’t true but God we wish it were".
The logo colours are not actually rainbow colours, they stack from green through red to a mid blue. No rainbow ever looked like that. And rainbow colours were only adopted by the gay community in 1978, a year after Apple's logo was introduced. Designer Rob Janoff explained - the colour stripes represented Apple's unique (at the time) commitment to colour, and the bite was to show scale - without which the apple looked like a cherry.
I tell this story because it reminds me of the power of coincidence to mislead. Coincidence is not evidence, a point worth remembering when something appears to be too true to be true.
How Big Is a Trillion?
If I gave you $1 every second, how long would it take for you to pocket one trillion dollars? Pause for a moment and make a guess. The answer may surprise you.
But before we go there, have you noticed how the word trillion has quietly become part of everyday economics? Only a decade ago, we spoke of billions. Now, trillion dollar figures appear in corporate valuations, in government budgets, and even in an individual's pay package.
As of February 2026, 11 publicly traded companies are worth a trillion dollars or more, including all "Magnificent 7" companies (Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet etc.). Meanwhile, the US national debt has climbed to about $38 trillion. And even more striking, Elon Musk’s pay package at Tesla could ultimately be worth $1 trillion if performance targets are met - yes, that’s one individual who today would be worth the same as the GDP of Switzerland or Poland!
So, back to the original question - how long would it take to reach one trillion dollars at $1 per second? It's about 31,000 years.
To put that in perspective, if Jesus had started handing out one dollar a second at his birth, he’d still have roughly 29,000 years to go. Human civilisation (earliest cities and writing) is arguably about 6,000 to 7,000 years old.
So when you next hear numbers in the trillions, just remember how big a trillion really is - so big it's almost beyond human comprehension.