From Google Groups, an elegant solution to a ponderous ponderable: "Is it true that there are more stars in the Universe than grains of sand on the planet Earth?"

"So how many grains of sand are there in the world? You could start off by trying to guess how many grains of sand there are in a spoon of sand. Use a magnifying glass to count how many grains fit in a small section. Then, count how many of those sections fit in your spoon. Multiply the two numbers together to get an estimate. "Using this same principle, plus some additional information, mathematicians at the University of Hawaii tried to guess how many grains of sand are on the world's beaches. They came up with 7,500,000,000,000,000,000, or seven quintillion five quadrillion grains of sand." How many grains of sand are in the world? http://www.miamisci.org/tripod/whysand.html The calculation is detailed here: http://www.hawaii.edu/suremath/jsand.html That number is 7.5 x 10^18 or 7.5 billion billion. How many stars, galaxies, clusters, QSO's etc. in the Universe? http://www.faqs.org/faqs/astronomy/faq/part8/section-3.html "To get the total stellar population in the Milky Way [that is, in our galaxy alone], we must take the number of luminous stars that we can see at large distances and assume that we know how many fainter stars go along with them. Recent numbers give about 400,000,000,000 (400 billion) stars, but a 50% error either way is quite plausible." So in our galaxy alone, there might be between 2 x 10^11 and 6 x 10^11 stars How many galaxies in the Universe? http://www.faqs.org/faqs/astronomy/faq/part8/section-4.html "the Hubble telescope is capable of detecting about 80 billion galaxies (although not all of these within the foreseeable future!). In fact, there must be many more than this, even within the observable Universe, since the most common kind of galaxy in our own neighborhood is the faint dwarfs which are difficult enough to see nearby, much less at large cosmological distances. For example, in our own local group, there are 3 or 4 giant galaxies which would be detectable at a billion light-years or more (Andromeda, the Milky Way, the Pinwheel in Triangulum, and maybe the Large Magellanic Cloud). However, there are at least another 20 faint members, which would be difficult to find at 100 million light-years, much less the billions of light years to which the brightest galaxies can be seen." So the lower end estimate for the number of galaxies is 8 x 10^10 If we accept even the lower end of these Hubble figures, and if our Milky Way has a typical number of stars in it, that puts the number of stars in the universe to be at least (2 x 10^11) x (8 x 10^10) = 16 x 10^ 21 So if we round the number of sand grains to, say, 10^20 and round the number of stars to, say 10^22 then there are at least 100 stars in the universe for every grain of sand on earth.

I think this answer is, in a nutshell, what I do as an instructional designer. Take material from diverse sources, clarify it, and present a solution to a problem in as clear and simple a package as possible. I must admit that at the end, I did applaud a little.