My Archives: January 2003
Tuesday, January 28, 2003
If you watch Extended Play you may note that their website lacks an overview of all the games reviewed, indexed by score. So I present the Extended Play Review Index. Updated regularly.
Posted by jrray @ 11:26 PM PDT [Link] [Karma: 0 (+/-)] [No Comments]
Friday, January 17, 2003
In one of my regular channels on IRC the subject of Sam's Club comes up, they're having some anniversary and are distributing some propaganda out to the masses. I have a very low quality fax of a page from that flyer, it contains a fun fact that I repeat here:
"Over the past year, 10,182,853 hot dogs have been sold at the SAM'S CLUB Café. If laid end to end, these hot dogs would stretch from the moon and back over 13 times. Laid end to end, they would go around the world 254.5 times."
It just so happens that I discovered the 'units' command today, a program that converts between units of measure. I'm part of a very small percentage of people who would enjoy playing with such a program. Upon seeing these facts, I immediately thought to plug them into 'units' and calculate the one unknown: how long is a SAM'S CLUB hot dog?
Units has a unit called 'moondist' already programmed into it, this is the "mean earth-moon distance." As the fun fact states, this chain of hot dogs goes to the moon and back over 13 times, so this is over 13 * 2 * moondist.
bash-2.05a$ units -v "13 * 2 * moondist" miles
13 * 2 * moondist = 6210232.2 milesSo the chain of hot dogs is 6,210,232.2 miles long. To figure the length of each hot dog, we simply divide this number by their quantity:
bash-2.05a$ units -v "13 * 2 * moondist / 10182853" miles
13 * 2 * moondist / 10182853 = 0.60987154 milesAh, interesting! Now we know why Paula Puckett thinks these hot dogs are so great. These very affordable hot dogs are over a half mile long.
We can double check this figure with the corroborating world encirclement number. Units also has a unit called 'earthradius.' To calculate the circumference we have to remember that c = 2 * Pi * r. The hot dog chain is 254.5 times Earth's circumference.
bash-2.05a$ units -v "254.5 * 2 * pi * earthradius" miles
254.5 * 2 * pi * earthradius = 6330659.5 miles6,330,659.5 miles is relatively close to the first result, and if you consider their moon figure is "over 13 times," that can account for the difference.
bash-2.05a$ units -v "254.5 * 2 * pi * earthradius / 10182853" miles
254.5 * 2 * pi * earthradius / 10182853 = 0.62169802 milesThat's a big hot dog. [more]
Posted by jrray @ 02:20 PM PDT [Link] [Karma: 1 (+/-)] [No Comments]
