To celebrate Christmas, I was going through and watching the 100 Incredible Lectures from the World’s Top Scientists.

When I got to A Passion for Discovery, I was pissed that they didn’t want me to be able to download it. So I used my web developer toolbar to “Disable all Styles” and then “Display object Information”. From there I was able to see that the lecture was being served from the CERN Document Server and a quick search later I found the lecture in a format that I could download.

Why did I want to download it? So I could use the VlC player’s option of ‘Playback -> Faster’ to watch the video 50% faster than normal speed.

At the 9:00 mark Peter Freund put up a slide of Einstein and other scientists appearing on actual currency. So here’s two of the things I love most coming together: science and money. Immediately I paused the video and searched for “Isaac Newton British Pound.”

That lead me to this fantastic website showing a collection of Banknotes featuring Scientists and Mathematicians. This guy has collected more than 50 images of banknotes featuring the likes of Einstein, Newton, Schrödinger, Euler, Galileo . . . etc. at 600 DPI!

The first thing I thought of was “How freaking cool (in a geeky way) would it be to have a poster with all these Bank Notes on it?” It would be easy to put these images together on a huge tiff file and then have it printed. But how much would printing cost?

My first few searches led to pretty high prices. But then I found a printer that will print 1000 24″X36″ posters for $871.50 – just 87 cents per poster (I was gonna sign up for their affiliate program but just can’t be bothered).

If I weren’t already making bank, and I didn’t mind dealing with fulfillment, I would totally buy 1000 of those posters and set up a site to sell them for $7.99 + $4.95 S&H. Then I would get a post on sites like geekdad to promote the posters, hit up the social media circuit with a video of me getting and opening the posters, and maybe even do some PPC or CPM advertising on science and math sites.

If you sell 125, you break even. If you sell all 1000, you make about $10k profit.

I can’t stand it when people whine about not knowing what to do; there are so many things to do to make money that I can’t be bothered to stop and do even 1% of them (like skipping the affiliate link above). If you can’t figure out a way to make money online, it’s because you’re just not trying.

By the way, if you DO make the poster I talked about above, let me know: I’ll be your first customer.