I had a difficult time understanding many of the authors we read in high school English: Joyce, Beckett, Yeats, etc. Today being St. Patty’s Day, I can’t help but think there are much more enjoyable ways to hear the thoughts of an incoherent Irishman. To be fair, my difficulty probably lies more with my short attention span than the authors’ writings, but perhaps there’s now a way around that. How many Tweets would it take to write out Finnegans Wake over Twitter?
Google lists Finnegans Wake at 676 pages. Each page contains about 36 lines and each line contains about 80 characters. From this, we can compute how many Tweets we’d need,
(676 pages) · (36 lines per page) · (80 characters per line) · (1 tweet per 140 characters)
= 14,000 tweets.
If you tweeted once a day, it would take over 38 years to finish Finnegans Wake.
People in the sports world have a reputation for being dumb jocks. Happily, there’s at least one former athlete we who can estimate with the best of them. In a recent interview, baseball hall-of-fame catcher Johnny Bench estimated he’d squatted 500,000 times. Was Mr. Bench’s estimate close?
Bench played almost 20 years with the Cincinnati Reds, not counting minor league and nonprofessional games. He played about 150 games per year. Each game the ball is pitched about 100 times, meaning Bench squatted about 100 times per game. His total number of squats is likely to be about double this since he’s also catching for practices. From these numbers we can estimate how many times he squatted over his career:
# of squats = 2 · (# squats per game) · (# games per year) · (# of years)
= 2 · (100 squats per game) · (150 games per year) · (20 years)
= 600,000 squats.
Well done, Mr. Bench! Your estimate is certainly reasonable.
It’s commonly said that ants can hold fifty times their own weight, but is this really as impressive as it sounds? After all, they certainly can’t pick us up2. If we want a fair comparison, we need to derive how much weight each species could lift if they were equal in size. How much weight could a human pick up if he were ant-sized?
Compared to their body size, ants have tiny legs whereas humans have medium-sized legs and elephants have huge legs. One reason for this is that the bigger a species gets the more weight it has to hold. An animal’s weight will be proportional to its volume, whereas the force holding up that weight will be roughly proportional to the cross-sectional area of the legs. If you double the height of an animal but keep all its limbs in proportion, then it will be 2 times as tall, but it will weigh 23 = 8 times as much because its weight grows as the length cubed. Likewise, since the force holding up the weight is proportional to the area, it will grow as the square of the length and be 22 = 4 times as large. If a human were to shrink down to the size of an ant, the amount of weight he could lift would shrink but his own weight would shrink even faster.
Let’s consider an 80 kg (~180 lbs) person that’s about 1.8 m (~6.0 ft) tall. If we shrink him down to the height of an ant, he’ll be about 3 mm tall, or roughly 600 times shorter. Using the fact that volume scales as the cube of the length, we can calculate his new mass,
new mass = (length scaling factor)3· (old mass)
= (1/600)3· (80 kg)
= 0.37 mg.
A fairly strong human should be able to lift about 100 kg (~220 lbs). Using the fact that strength scales roughly as the square of the length, we can estimate how much weight his new tiny self can pick up,
new mass = (length scaling factor)2· (old mass)
= (1/600)2 · (100 kg)
= 277 mg.
Comparing these two numbers, we see that an ant-sized human could lift an astonishing 750 times his own weight. If you want to play around with these scaling relations, try estimating how much a human-sized ant could pick up. Is there any chance that giant ants will take over the world?
[1] Kudos to anyone who’s both geeky enough to read this blog and well versed enough in weightlifting sub-culture to get this reference. I admit, I had some difficulty choosing between Pisarenko and Süleymanoğlu, but I couldn’t justify shrinking an already pocket-sized Hercules.
[2] In How Many Licks?, I estimate that it would take 65,000 ants to hold up one human.
Geez, talk about all brawn and no brain. What’s faster: leaping over the world’s tallest building in a single bound or just running around it?
The world’s tallest building is the 828 m (~2,717 ft) tall Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Burj Khalifa appears to be less than 200 m wide. A world-class sprinter can run 200 m in about 20 s, but Superman, moving like a speeding bullet, can travel this in less than 1.0 s. If he were to leap over the building in a single bound, the minimum amount of time it would take is given by the equation,
t = 2 · [2 · (height) / (acceleration of gravity) ]1/2
= 2 · [2 · (828 m) / (9.8 m/s2) ]1/2
= 26 s.
Even with all that speed, Superman’s a little slow on the uptake. He could run around the building in about one-tenth the time.
Something always bothered me about the GI Joe toy line. According to Wikipedia, the 2.3 m (~7.5 ft) USS Flagg was the largest toy in the collection. However, if you compare the relative size of the aircraft carrier to the F-14 Tomcat in the real life and toy versions, you’ll see something is radically different. How large would the USS Flagg aircraft carrier be if made to scale?
GI Joe action figures measure 9.53 cm (~3+.75 in) tall. If we assume a real soldier is 1.8 m (~6 ft) tall, then the human-to-toy scaling factor is 0.052. A real aircraft carrier is about 332.85 meters (~1,092 feet) in length. From this we can compute the scaled length of a toy aircraft carrier,
length = (scaling factor) · (actual length)
= (0.052) ·(332.85 meters)
= 17 m (~57 ft).
The USS Flagg should have been eight times bigger!
I had a difficult time understanding many of the authors we read in high school English: Joyce, Beckett, Yeats, etc. Today being St. Patty’s Day, I can’t help but think there are much more enjoyable ways to hear the thoughts of an incoherent Irishman. To be fair, my difficulty probably lies more with my short attention span than the authors’ writings, but perhaps there’s now a way around that. How many Tweets would it take to write out Finnegans Wake over Twitter?
