John Leguizamo's character is a math professor who keeps using uplifting percentage statistics to cheer up. At one point, he asks a panick-stricken woman the question, "if I give you a penny the first day, 2 pennnies the day after, 4 pennnies after that and keep doubling for a month, how much money will I have paid you?". The woman guesses 2-3 times ranging from a dollar to 30 dollars before the professor gives her the answer of "more than 10 million dollars", a figure easily verifiable (Since the answer X = 2^30-1 or abut 2^30 pennies, if you approximate log(10) = 0.3, you get log(X) about 30*0.3 = 9, giving X = a billion pennies, equalling 10 million dollars)