A Pool Full Of Pudding...
April 14, 2008 – 7:30 amThis 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 been thinking about swimming pools.
You see, there are many types of swimming pools, so I could have spent hours arguing about how much volume is in a swimming pool, but a regulation Olympic size pool has a specific minimum amount of water: 2,500 cubic meters. And I was curious how much enough chocolate pudding to fill an Olympic size pool would weigh.
And that's why I had my trusty food scale out, determining that the pudding solids made the Jello Brand Chocolate Pudding denser than water. Approximately 25% denser. So while the water in an olympic swimming pool would weigh 2,500 metric tonnes (1 cubic meter of water is 1,000 liters, which weighs 1,000 kilograms) or 5,510,000 pounds, 2500 cubic meters of Jello Brand Chocolate Pudding would weigh in at roughly 6,887,500 pounds.
But when you've got 2.5 million liters of volume to play with, there are a wide variety of Rough Equivalents you can derive. That pool's volume would be roughly equivalent to:
- 7,346,667 pounds of Smucker's squeezable grape jelly.
- 5,142,667 pounds of I Can't Believe It's Not Butter (original style).
- 4,775,333 pounds of lard (which has the same energy as 692,041.47 gallons of gas).
But why fill up an olympic size pool with food... when you can fill it up with beer? For example, since this is about swimming and we might want to keep the fishy feel, I thought to fill it up with 2.5 million liters of Budweiser-Clamato Chelada. If you're not familiar with Clamato, it's a beverage made by mixing tomato juice with clam. Now they've gone one step further, mixed it with beer, and sell that mixture in cans.
They've fortified the mix, so it has the same alcoholic content as straight Budweiser, which is 5% by volume, or 125,000 liters of pure alcohol swimming around among the 2,375,000 liters of water, carbs, and clam.
125,000 liters of pure alcohol is roughly equal to:
- 165,563 liters of Bacardi 151
- 312,500 liters of Stoli (vodka)
- 1,041,667 liters of Moet & Chandon White Star champagne
- 1,666,667 liters of Guinness Foreign Extra Stout
So, what kind of Rough Equivalents can you come up with for the contents of an Olympic sized pool?
2 Responses to “A Pool Full Of Pudding...”
So I was looking at the Google searches that came in yesterday and one directed at this page was for the volume of an olympic-size pool in cubic feet. I thought I'd post the answer in case any more such queries came in.
Since the volume is 2,500 cubic meters, multiply that by roughly 35.314 cubic feet per meter for 88,285 cubic feet of volume (give or take). If you actually do it by cubing 39.37 cubic inches, then dividing by 12 inches cubed, then multiplying that by 2500, you get 88,286.1371 cubic feet. But 88,285 is a nice round number that will work for most purposes.
-- Greg
By Greg Bulmash on Apr 23, 2008