We've all run into it. You get your computer with the 300 gigabyte drive and when you look at the space free, it says that the drive's capacity is actually 279 gigabytes. You think you were a victim of false advertising until you read the fine print. The manufacturer measures a gigabyte as 1 billion bytes and you find out that your computer measures it as 1,073,741,824 bytes.
Despite findings that it's a silly recommendation there are still people who suggest that you drink eight 8-ounce glasses of water a day for weight loss or colon health or proper hydration.
One of the trains of thought I read on this is that people lose 10 cups of water a day, get 4 cups from foods, and need to drink 48 ounces of water to make up the defecit, but since we drink so many caffeinated beverages which act as diuretics (make us lose more water), we need to actually drink 8 cups to make up for the added water loss.
I'm not concerned so much with what is right and what is wrong, but more with the rough equivalents for 8 cups of water a day. Right off the bat, that's 2 quarts or 1/2 gallon. So it's being recommended that you drink 3.5 gallons per week, 182.625 gallons per year (365.25 days). At that pace, how long would it take to drink all the water in an Olympic size swimming pool?
We know that the official volume of an Olympic size swimming pool is 2500 cubic meters, which equals 2,500,000 liters. If a gallon is 3.785411784 liters, then it's recommended that you drink roughly 691.31 liters a year. At that rate, it would take you 3,616 years and 118 days (or 1,320,862 days) to drink up every last drop in an Olympic size pool. Or, as a reservoir, an Olympic size pool holds enough water to meet the daily drinking water needs of 44,028 people for a month. Of course, when you add in toilet-flushing water, bath water, clothes-washing water, landscaping water, and shaving-in-the-shower water it probably lasts an American family of four less than a year.
If you take a 10-minute shower under a water-saving nozzle that limits the flow to three gallons per minute, your shower used as much water as 60 days of drinking 8 cups a day. If your toilet uses 2 gallons and you flush 5 times a day, you use 20 days worth of water. And remember, there are experts who are saying you only need 4-6 cups of water a day. At 6 cups of water a day, that showering and toilet flushing would use up 106.6 days worth of water instead of 80.
Of course, we can also convert a year's worth of 8-glasses-a-day into its equivalent volume. At 231 cubic inches per gallon, 182.625 gallons is 42,186.375 cubic inches or 24.413 cubic feet of water. While it's nowhere near enough to fill an Olympic size pool, it's enough to fill a bathtub that is 4.5 feet long, 2.5 feet wide, and 2 feet deep.
What Rough Equivalents can you come up with for 8 glasses of water a day? Post them in the comments section below.
I know it's been a little while since my last post and it may seem odd for me to do a second post in a row about smoking, but last month I marked 1 year since I'd last had a cigarette or any sort of tobacco use, and it got me thinking about all the cigarettes I'd smoked over the 23 or so years since I first picked it up and when I last put it down.
First, I want to tell any of you who believed the tobacco companies when they said it isn't addictive, that it's an addiction just like alcohol or drugs or gambling. You can quit and be clean of the "physical addiction" for as long as you like, but you'll always want to go back. You don't quit smoking and the urge to smoke goes away. The urge remains. It just gets weaker and you stop giving in to it.
My thing is that if I started smoking again, my wife wouldn't say "oh well. I guess you're just a smoker. Thanks for trying." She'd be on my case, demanding to know when I was going to quit again. I've decided the pain of quitting again wouldn't be worth whatever temporary pleasure I'd get from starting up again.
Anyhow, I decided to try to tally up all the tobacco I'd used during that 23 years. Sometimes I smoked less, sometimes more, and gave up for a few months here and there, so I'm going to call it an average of 3/4 of a pack a day for 23 years. That's 23 times 365, plus 5 leap year days for exactly 8400 days times 15 cigarettes a day. That's 126,000 cigarettes or 6300 packs. If we multiplied that by the current pricing of nearly $6 a pack here in Washington, that would be $37,800, enough to buy over 5 and one half tons of SPAM. It's enough to feed 272 people 2,000 calories worth of SPAM per day for a month. So, the cost of 23 years worth of cigarettes is roughly equal to enough SPAM to feed a large village for a month.
Doing some research on the weight of a cigarette, I came up with .68 grams of tobacco per cigarette. Thus the tobacco in 23 years worth of cigarettes would be 188.84 pounds of tobacco. That's around the weight I *should* be (if I ate right and exercised more). I smoked a grown man's weight worth of tobacco.
Can you come up with any more rough equivalents for 23 years of smoking? Post them in the comments below.
If you need help, try my Smoking Calculator at calculators-free.com. You can use it to do the calculations, plus there's free Creative Commons licensed source code if you'd like to put the calculator on your site.
So, I know I said no posts this week to save my eyes, but this is going to be a short one.
Reader Joel dropped me a note asking my opinion about his math on a Metafilter post about bidis. In it, he points out a page that makes some incredible claims about the worldwide production and consumption of an Indian cigarete called a bidi (or beedi, or beedie, or beedy, or biri).
He pointed out three facts that the herbal smoke shop stated:
From this he derived VERY rough equivalents of 2.7 bidis smoked per man, woman, and child in India per day, 100,000 bidis smoked per man, woman, and child per year around the world (which, to me, means that the Indians are WAAAY behind their daily quota and need to pick up some slack -- these bidis aren't going to smoke themselves), and 1.3 million workers churning out bidis just to meet the Indian national demand.
So here's my critique of your math, Joel... First, don't assume that every bidi is hand-rolled. There are many enterprising businessmen in India. I'm sure a few factories have automated the process and churn them out. So the estimate of 1.3 million rollers to meet demand is cool, but unrealistic.
Second, there are 1.15 billion people in India according to recent estimates, so it's more like 2.38 bidis per person per day. Seeing as the herbal smokeshop is selling them in packs of 25, a trillion a year is basically like 9.52% of the country having a pack-a-day habit. Totally realistic.
Now, when you get to the "700 trillion" bidis annual consumption worldwide, just estimating 100,000 a day per human on the planet was a good start, but you needed to go farther.
For example, if you took the smoke shop's price and worked with that: They're charging 1.8 British pounds per pack of 25. At $1.9545 U.S. dollars per British pound, that breaks down to roughly 14.07 cents per bidi. At that price, 700 trillion bidis would cost $98,490,000,000,000, or around 98.5 trillion dollars. That's 49.63% more than the gross domestic product of the whole freakin' world. I know tobacco's getting expensive, but give me a break.
Another fun game you could have played was with weight. Let's estimate each bidi weighs 1/10th of an ounce. At that weight, 700 trillion bidis would cumulatively weigh 2,187,500,000 tons. That's roughly equivalent to 22,551 fully loaded Nimitz class aircraft carriers. That's the planes, the armaments, the fuel, the food for 135,306,000 crew (6,000 per ship), that 135 million crew and their personal effects, and the ships themselves.
So, Joel, your math wasn't bad... a bit inexact, but that's what Rough Equivalents are all about. My only suggestion is that once you get the math started, take it places people don't expect it to go. Cheers.
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