Mint the coin. Mint it.

The proposal that the president should order the US Treasury to mint a trillion-dollar platinum coin—a ploy to sidestep the debt ceiling, which will prevent further borrowing sometime in February—has generated a ton of hype and garnered some support online. Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Krugman is for it, as is Business Insider’s Joe Weisenthal. Others, like The Guardian’s Heidi Moore and Quartz’s Tim Fernholz, consider the idea absurd.

It’s highly unlikely that Obama would even consider the scheme. But the real question about the platinum coin is: What would the thing look like? And most importantly, how big should a trillion dollar coin be?

A coin can be any size. The Treasury gets to decide a coin’s worth, and the value of the metal that comprises the coin doesn’t have anything to do with its value in currency. Say the Platinum Trill (our name for the coin) were the size of a standard circulating US coin. Here’s how much the metal would cost:

Or, we could pick the size in a more sophisticated way. There is a very rough relationship between the face value of a coin and the raw value of its metal. You could extrapolate that relationship to $1 trillion like so:

The result is a coin made of $60 billion of pure platinum that weighs about 500,000 pounds, and, if it had the same proportions as a quarter, would be 10.5 yards in diameter and a little over two feet tall. Not exactly pocket change.

The Quebec Provincial Police have arrested three people in a maple syrup heist that captivated the world this summer. The suspects, who were expected in Canadian court on Tuesday, are accused of stealing millions of dollars of syrup from the “strategic international reserve” maintained by the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers in Saint-Louis-de-Blandford.

The arrests come months after syrup officials noticed the missing breakfast-and-dessert accoutrement in the warehouse while preparing to transport it to another facility in August. They also follow Statistics Canada’s 2012 syrup production estimates, which were released Friday. The new data show Canadian taps dripped 8.1% less maple sap in 2012 than the previous year, perhaps raising the impact–and value–of the goods stolen in Quebec.

Canadian syrup production has steadily increased since the 1970s. Until recent years, US production kept pace, and by 2007, after three years of production- limiting quotas in Canada, the difference between the two countries’ production was only 300,000 US gallons. However, repeal of the quotas has been followed by the gap widening to almost 6 million gallons in 2011, the most recently available US data, and this year is not looking much better for the US.

Maple syrup prices are near an all-time high. In the US, prices rose 36% from 2000 to 2010. In Canada, syrup prices were up 61% over the same period.