Born on March 26, 1973, Google cofounder Larry Page turns 35 today. Maybe wife Lucy will get Larry some jewelry to match Sergey's. (Photo by dannysullivan)

It's been years since I attended SXSW Interactive. The conference swelled and shrank with the dotcom boom; if conference attendance is a meaningful indicator, things are booming again — at least for the organizers. A veteran of the conference circuit laid out the math for me: There are roughly 8,000 attendees this year. Of those, about 5,000 are paid — panelists, media, and a host of other people get in for free. Those who pay are shelling out anywhere from $325 to $450 apiece. (Full disclosure: I'm attending free as a panelist, though I would otherwise have applied for a press pass.) My back-of-the-envelope calculation puts SXSW Interactive's take somewhere in the range of $1.6 million to $2.2 million. That barely covers the event's costs; most of the profit comes from sponsorships. Still, $2 million in 5 days? Startups would kill for that run rate.

Nortel, the second-rung maker of telecom equipment, is losing money. In an attempt to stop doing that, the company is firing 3,100 workers. Of course, that's not how Nortel PR is spinning it. The AP reports: "The company said it plans to cut about 2,100 jobs globally and will shift approximately 1,000 additional jobs to lower-cost areas." Even with our mere powers of journalist math, we can calculate that the company is really firing 3,100 employees and hiring 1,000 more for lower pay — a likely euphemism for "shifting jobs overseas."

For the liberal-arts majors who still dominate the ranks of reporters, simple multiplication is a daunting task. Which is likely why Radar and Silicon Alley Insider have contributed 419 words about the firing of Gawker reporter Maggie Shnayerson, yet failed to answer the essential question: How much was she making? The answer is simple, based on publicly available information:

A tipster corrects our math. Severance pay and "related cash expenditures" will cost Yahoo a surprisingly low $25 million — because the company may not pay annual bonuses on March 14 to its 1,000-plus laid-off employees. The savings may range as high as $14 million, he estimates. Bonuses are always awarded at the discretion of managers — and why would they give a bonus to someone no longer with the company?

Severance pay and "related cash expenditures" will cost Yahoo between $20 million to $25 million, the company said in an SEC filing. Given that Yahoo laid off around 1,000 employees, crude math with these figures suggests laid-off Yahoos walked off with an average severance package of $20,000 to $25,000. Call it $7,500 a month for three months of severance pay. Annualized, that makes being a laid-off Yahoo a $90,000-a-year job.