Football Fields of Spilled Oil

May 13, 2010 – 11:54 am

It's been a long time since I posted, but I got an idea the other day and my mind wouldn't let it go until I did the math. With 200,000 gallons of oil per day spilling into the Gulf of Mexico from the BP oil rig explosion, how could I envision that amount in a number I could grasp?

Well, luckily, gallons are just units of volume and easily converted into areas. And an area most Americans are familiar with is a football field. From goal line to goal line, sideline to sideline, a football field is 300 feet by 160 feet. To standardize everything into metric measurements, that's 91.44 by 48.768 meters, or 4459.345 square meters.

Now, a liter is just 1,000 cubic centimeters and the area of a meter is 10,000 square centimeters. So to fill a square meter area one centimeter deep would require 10,000 cubic centimeters of material, or ten liters.

When we convert 200,000 gallons into liters, we get 757082.356 liters, and we would need 44593.45 liters to cover the footmall field 1 centimeter deep. When we divide 757082.356 by 44593.45, we get a depth of 16.977 centimeters, or 6.68 inches.

So, the amount of oil being spilled into the Gulf of Mexico is enough to cover an American football field 6 2/3 inches deep, or 6 2/3 football fields an inch deep, or enough to create a millimeter thick oil slick the size of almost 170 football fields... every day.

Posted in Area, Volume | 3 Comments »

Deadly Yogurt From Costco

August 5, 2008 – 10:12 am

If you're a "generation X" member, you probably remember the 1970s Dannon Yogurt commercial about the people in Soviet Georgia who ate lots of yogurt and lived into their hundreds. For decades, we've been told that yogurt is healthy and good for you. Unfortunately, not all yogurts are created equal.

This morning, I got up early and had breakfast with my son before he went to day care.  He likes to have yogurt for breakfast, so I had some with him.

They had Brown Cow yogurt on sale at our local supermarket, and he and my wife loooove it. When I told him he could have some Brown Cow this morning, he did a happy dance (he's 3). I decided to eat a cup of the Kirkland brand (Costco's house brand) yogurt we had in the fridge so that I wouldn't depelete the stash of Brown Cow for my wife and son.

All I can say after eating that cup of Costco yogurt is... what the bloody hell? Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Food & Diet, Health | 6 Comments »

Billions and Billions

July 28, 2008 – 10:09 pm

So, I recently got the idea of "billions and billions" in my head, thanks to memories of Carl Sagan, and wondered how many "billions and billions" is, particularly in respect to the Milky Way galaxy.

According to the Physics Factbook, the consensus among modern theorists seems to be that the number of stars in our galaxy is around 100 billion give or take a handful.

Of course, stars are massive. Our own sun, which is not one of the bigger classes of stars masses 1.9891 * 10³⁰ kilograms or 332,946 times the weight of the Earth. So 100 billion stars is obviously pretty massive.

But what if you had 100 billion grains of sand, or 100 billion popcorn kernels--as many as all the stars in the galaxy?
How much would they weigh?

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Weight/Mass | 1 Comment »

A Million Times

July 16, 2008 – 8:52 am

When you were a kid (some of you may still be), how many times do you recall your parents or some authority figure prefacing an admonition with "if I told you once, I told you a million times"? Well, how long would it take them to tell you something a million times?

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Quantity, Time | Post A Comment »