Archive for April, 2008
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008
digg_url = 'http://digg.com/odd_stuff/How_Many_Pickled_Peppers_In_a_Peck';
We all know the tongue twister: "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. How many pickled peppers did Peter Piper pick?" But not a lot of people know the answer, which is: "it depends."
A peck is not a count, like a dozen. ...
Posted in Food & Diet, Volume | 1 Comment »
Monday, April 28th, 2008
Graffiti in Sevilla, Spain. Neva Micheva, 2004.Source: Wikimedia CommonsWe've all heard the old adage: "a picture is worth a thousand words." I thought I'd use that as a jumping off point for today's post. If a picture is worth a thousand words, what's a thousand words worth... and ...
Posted in Bits & Bytes, Content | 2 Comments »
Friday, April 25th, 2008
In my previous post, I discussed the British Thermal Unit (BTU) and how it converted into horsepower. The thing I didn't mention is that a BTU is very similar to a food calorie. A BTU is the energy needed to raise one pound of water by one ...
Posted in Energy, Food & Diet, Speed | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
Even though it snowed less than a week ago here in Seattle ("I'm dreaming of a white... Passover?"), we're barely a month away from Memorial Day weekend, the official kick off of Summer. To me, Summer means two things: barbecues and air conditioners. And the cool/hot thing is ...
Posted in Energy | No Comments »
Monday, April 21st, 2008
How is Bush's latest war funding request roughly equal to the amount of toilet paper needed to cover Texas and California? How much would it cost to cover Iraq in toilet paper? Read on and find out.
In my previous post on how much toilet paper it would take to ...
Posted in Area, Monetary Value | No Comments »
Friday, April 18th, 2008
I was recently reading an article in which someone was quoted as saying a problem they faced was costing "a ton of money." Of course, his ton was figurative, merely meaning "a lot," but it got me thinking... just how much is a ton of money worth?
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The first thing ...
Posted in Monetary Value, Weight/Mass | 3 Comments »
Thursday, April 17th, 2008
So, based on the post I wrote to launch Rough Equivalents, here's my first Rough Equivalents viral video, entitled "If People Could Run on Gasoline":
Feel free to embed it on your web site, share the URL, or pop over to YouTube and rate it or leave a comment.
Thank you for ...
Posted in Energy, Videos | No Comments »
Thursday, April 17th, 2008
If you suffer from insomnia that's not bad enough for a prescription, but you do take non-prescription pills you can buy at the pharmacy, you may find today's Rough Equivalents very interesting. You see, all of these are roughly equivalent:
Tylenol Simply Sleep - 100 tablets ($11.79* - 23.6 cents ...
Posted in Monetary Value | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008
One of the things that inspired me to create this blog was a blog post about CafePress where I expressed unhappiness about how much time a new policy of theirs would cost their shopkeepers. I came up with a figure of 25,000 hours, then did some Rough Equivalents. ...
Posted in Distance | No Comments »
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
Every once in a while, when they do a news story about aircraft carriers, the "landing on a moving postage stamp" metaphor is used to describe trying to set a fighter jet down on the flight deck safely. One of the more entertaining Rough Equivalents for a carrier landing ...
Posted in Area, Monetary Value, Weight/Mass | 1 Comment »
Monday, April 14th, 2008
This weekend I pulled out my trusty kitchen scale, a half-cup measure, placed the measure on the scale, zeroed it out, and began spooning in Jello Brand Chocolate Pudding from pudding cups I got in the refrigerated aisle. I wanted to determine the pudding's weight by volume, because I'd ...
Posted in Content, Food & Diet, Volume, Weight/Mass | 2 Comments »
Friday, April 11th, 2008
I have sitting next to me a roll of Kirkland Embossed Bath Tissue from Costco. You know, the kind of toilet paper you pick up in a pack bigger than a small child. With so much toilet paper, you could probably cover something pretty big. Maybe Texas?
So, ...
Posted in Area | 1 Comment »
Thursday, April 10th, 2008
I was reading an article about farts in which flatulence expert Dr. Michael D. Levitt (a.k.a. Doctor Fart) was quoted as saying that the average human male farts 110 milliliters of gas.
There's an urban legend about a man who suffocated on his own farts. It states that he farted ...
Posted in Volume | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, April 9th, 2008
It's a very long distance around our planet, very long indeed. With a diameter of approximately 8,000 miles we multiply by Pi (3.14159) to get the circumference (distance around) and come up with roughly 25,132 miles around.
If you believe Wikipedia's facts about Earth, it's 25,046.5 miles. ...
Posted in Distance, Weight/Mass | No Comments »
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008
Welcome to Rough Equivalents. This is where my twisted brain comes up with odd factoids like how long it would take to drive to the moon in rush hour traffic, creating strange correlations and using odd measurements. It's fun with math, but plain enough that you don't have ...
Posted in Energy, Food & Diet | No Comments »
