Assumptions:
'London' = innter and greater London
Estimates:
8million people in London
Average 2.5 people per household
Average size of dwelling around 1000 sq ft
90% dwellings made from brick
Average dwelling = 8,000 bricks including internal walls and driveways etc.
Public buildings are made from brick
Public buildings ofset those dwellings not made from brick
Brick yards contain a small % of total bricks
Buried old bricks are discounted
Calculations:
8,000,000/ 2.5 = 320,000 dwellings
8000 x 320,000
= 25,600,000,000 bricks in London
Friday 30 April 2010
Tuesday 16 March 2010
How many marbles can you fit into an old mini?
OK so to answer this we need to know how much volume is inside an old mini in litres and then how many marbles can fit into a litre Then we simply multiply by the number of litres we think a mini can hold.
OK so how many litres can a mini hold? One way to calculate this would be to take a plaster cast of the inside of the car then take the cast and dump it in fresh water. This would give us it's displacement. As this is a thought experiment that is not realistic!
I have a rucksack that can hold 20 litres in volume. I estimate that if I were to try and fill up an old mini with a multiple of these rucksacks and that the rucksacks were very 'giving' i.e. filled up all available space, excluding volume of space taken up by seats and interior parts to the car, I think I could get about 4 in the boot, about 4 in the back seat and about 4 in the front seat. Total 12 bags. This feels a bit under though as I mentioned the bags can fit in the space perfectly ..so say 15 bags total. So 15 x 20 = 250 litres total in the mini.
Right so how many marbles in a litre? A litre is a metric measurement and I think is 1,000th of a cubic m squared. The mini would be .25 cubic meter squared.
From memory an average marble is around 1 cm in diameter. If you think about how marbles sit in a jar there is actually space between them which we need to discount. So I would estimate ten marbles in a row would be say 10 cm long. 10 rows of marbles would be 100 marbles in a slab. Then 10 times this 100 marbles would give us 1000 marbles in a litre.
So this feels a little high but lets do the sum anyway - 1000 x 250 = 250,000 marbles in an old mini.
OK lets check this...later!
OK so how many litres can a mini hold? One way to calculate this would be to take a plaster cast of the inside of the car then take the cast and dump it in fresh water. This would give us it's displacement. As this is a thought experiment that is not realistic!
I have a rucksack that can hold 20 litres in volume. I estimate that if I were to try and fill up an old mini with a multiple of these rucksacks and that the rucksacks were very 'giving' i.e. filled up all available space, excluding volume of space taken up by seats and interior parts to the car, I think I could get about 4 in the boot, about 4 in the back seat and about 4 in the front seat. Total 12 bags. This feels a bit under though as I mentioned the bags can fit in the space perfectly ..so say 15 bags total. So 15 x 20 = 250 litres total in the mini.
Right so how many marbles in a litre? A litre is a metric measurement and I think is 1,000th of a cubic m squared. The mini would be .25 cubic meter squared.
From memory an average marble is around 1 cm in diameter. If you think about how marbles sit in a jar there is actually space between them which we need to discount. So I would estimate ten marbles in a row would be say 10 cm long. 10 rows of marbles would be 100 marbles in a slab. Then 10 times this 100 marbles would give us 1000 marbles in a litre.
So this feels a little high but lets do the sum anyway - 1000 x 250 = 250,000 marbles in an old mini.
OK lets check this...later!
Tuesday 16 June 2009
How many Embalmers are there working in the United States
Embalmers are specialists who work preparing bodies for the afterlife. Embalming fluid and a number of other specialist procedures are used to preserve corpses. I'm not certain if this Embalming fluid is used for all deaths i.e. to prevent the spread of diseases etc from corpses or if used primarily for deaths where the family want an open coffin etc. I would expect even where a corpse is being cremated that some kind of preservative would be used but that the skills of an Embalmer are only employed where an open coffin is required and the body needs to look presentable for next of kin and those who wish to say goodbye.
Population of the US: I think there are around 400 million people in the USA.
Death Rate: (number of people dying per day): Life expectancy is around 75 years or so. I know women tend to live longer than men but would expect the average to be around 75 years. So in an average life would be 365 x 75 or 27,375 days.
400,000,000 / 27,375 = 14,611. So the 'death rate' in the United States is around 14,611 people dying per day. This many people dying every day would keep the population steady. The population may be growing or shrinking but for our purposes will assume it is steady.
% of those dying who would be embalmed (not cremated for example): So out of those 14,611 I would expect only around half would be buried with the other half cremated. Of the people who are buried I would further expect around a half of this number would need the an Embalmer. S0 (14,611 / 2) / 2 = 3,652.
Number of bodies a typical embalmer could expect to prepare per working day: Difficult but I would say at least 2 hours per body. Probably more if the deceased had died in an accident or something. Lets say 2 hours per body. So an Embalmer working full time could expect to prepare around 4 bodies per shift. 3,652 / 4 = 913.
I estimate there are about 913 full time Embalmers working in the USA.
(Having researched this there are actually 306m people in the USA - excludes illegal immigrants for obvious reasons. According to the National Centre for Health Statistics in 2006 there were 2,426,264 deaths in the United States. This averages at 6647.2 deaths per day. The term Death Rate actually refers to the number of people who die per 100,000 in a population per year and not how I have described in my post. For interest the death rate in the USA is about 810 death per 100,000 in 2006. There are no statistics I could find on the number of Embalmers working in the USA currently as they appear to be registered on a state level rather than nationally)
Population of the US: I think there are around 400 million people in the USA.
Death Rate: (number of people dying per day): Life expectancy is around 75 years or so. I know women tend to live longer than men but would expect the average to be around 75 years. So in an average life would be 365 x 75 or 27,375 days.
400,000,000 / 27,375 = 14,611. So the 'death rate' in the United States is around 14,611 people dying per day. This many people dying every day would keep the population steady. The population may be growing or shrinking but for our purposes will assume it is steady.
% of those dying who would be embalmed (not cremated for example): So out of those 14,611 I would expect only around half would be buried with the other half cremated. Of the people who are buried I would further expect around a half of this number would need the an Embalmer. S0 (14,611 / 2) / 2 = 3,652.
Number of bodies a typical embalmer could expect to prepare per working day: Difficult but I would say at least 2 hours per body. Probably more if the deceased had died in an accident or something. Lets say 2 hours per body. So an Embalmer working full time could expect to prepare around 4 bodies per shift. 3,652 / 4 = 913.
I estimate there are about 913 full time Embalmers working in the USA.
(Having researched this there are actually 306m people in the USA - excludes illegal immigrants for obvious reasons. According to the National Centre for Health Statistics in 2006 there were 2,426,264 deaths in the United States. This averages at 6647.2 deaths per day. The term Death Rate actually refers to the number of people who die per 100,000 in a population per year and not how I have described in my post. For interest the death rate in the USA is about 810 death per 100,000 in 2006. There are no statistics I could find on the number of Embalmers working in the USA currently as they appear to be registered on a state level rather than nationally)
Thursday 11 June 2009
How high would the stack be if you piled on 1 trillion £5 notes on top of each other?
A £5 note, or indeed and bank note, is normally printed on pretty thick paper. I suppose this is so the notes don't wear out and that they are easily identified as currency, can hold a water mark and have that silver bit of metal sewn into them. So a perfectly new note fresh from an ATM would probably be about .10 of a mm thick I would imagine. However this is not easy to estimate for example it could be .5 mm thick or .2 mm thick. I really cant tell just from looking at a note and not having any knowledge of paper thicknesses and estimating on this basis would leave too big a margin for introducing a compounding error.
What I do remember is paying for a car once using cash. The fellow selling me the car insisted on me paying cash which I thought was strange in this day and age but anyway I wanted the car so and so I went into the bank and asked them to give to me £6.5k in cash. When they gave the cash to me I remember they gave it to me in used £10 notes which were wrapped up in bundles of £1000. Each £1000 bundle was about an inch thick or in metric 2.54 cms. So the entire stack was 6.5 inches or 16.5 cms. So I had around 650 ten pound notes and the hight of the stack was around 16.5 cms.
Now a trillion as far as I know is a thousand billion and a billion is a thousand million. So a million is written 1,000,000 (6 0's) A billion would therefore be 1,000,000,000 and a trillion 1,000,000,000,000. I think in scientific notation a trillion would look like 1 x 10 to the power of 12.
Now we will assume for arguments sake that there is no difference in thickness between a £10 and a £5 note. So if we divide 1,000,000,000,000 / 650 we get 1,538,461,538.
Now we multiply the 1,538,461,538 x 16.5 = 25,384,615,385.
So we have a stack 25,384,615,385 cms tall or 25,384.6 kilometers high.
The other assumption is of course that we are using used notes and that they are tied up in bundles. Also we are discounting any impact of the weight of the notes on top crushing the notes below so this would no doubt have an impact on the final measurement.
(I have tried to look up the size of a £5 note. The bank of England has some useful data on the size of the notes but not on the width. Various internet sources claim a dollar bill is 0.0043 inches thick or 0.10922 mm. Assuming a £5 note is about the same we get 0.10922 x 1 x 10 to the power of 12 = 109.220 kilometers. So with the estimate of 25k kilometer I was out by 84 kilometers. A fair distance off but will within Fermi's order of magnitude!)
What I do remember is paying for a car once using cash. The fellow selling me the car insisted on me paying cash which I thought was strange in this day and age but anyway I wanted the car so and so I went into the bank and asked them to give to me £6.5k in cash. When they gave the cash to me I remember they gave it to me in used £10 notes which were wrapped up in bundles of £1000. Each £1000 bundle was about an inch thick or in metric 2.54 cms. So the entire stack was 6.5 inches or 16.5 cms. So I had around 650 ten pound notes and the hight of the stack was around 16.5 cms.
Now a trillion as far as I know is a thousand billion and a billion is a thousand million. So a million is written 1,000,000 (6 0's) A billion would therefore be 1,000,000,000 and a trillion 1,000,000,000,000. I think in scientific notation a trillion would look like 1 x 10 to the power of 12.
Now we will assume for arguments sake that there is no difference in thickness between a £10 and a £5 note. So if we divide 1,000,000,000,000 / 650 we get 1,538,461,538.
Now we multiply the 1,538,461,538 x 16.5 = 25,384,615,385.
So we have a stack 25,384,615,385 cms tall or 25,384.6 kilometers high.
The other assumption is of course that we are using used notes and that they are tied up in bundles. Also we are discounting any impact of the weight of the notes on top crushing the notes below so this would no doubt have an impact on the final measurement.
(I have tried to look up the size of a £5 note. The bank of England has some useful data on the size of the notes but not on the width. Various internet sources claim a dollar bill is 0.0043 inches thick or 0.10922 mm. Assuming a £5 note is about the same we get 0.10922 x 1 x 10 to the power of 12 = 109.220 kilometers. So with the estimate of 25k kilometer I was out by 84 kilometers. A fair distance off but will within Fermi's order of magnitude!)
Wednesday 10 June 2009
How many people would fit hand in hand around the world and how many of those would have to tread water?
Im not sure of the exact circumference of the earth. The time it took me on a flight to Thailand from the UK was 12 hours and as commercial airliners can fly at around 500- 600 mph I estimate Thailand should be about 6-7 k miles away.
However from memory that wasn't exactly half way around the earth from the UK so would estimate that you would need another few thousand miles to reach this point. Assuming then that this is halfway mark is about 9k miles away. This would mean that circumference of the earth is about 18k. miles
When I stand with my hands in the relaxed 'hand in hand' pose (not my own hands in order that other people can hold my hands) I estimate that the distance from one hand to the other is about 4ft. As there are 5280 ft in a mile this would mean that a link of around 1320 people would fit into a mile distance.
If we multiply the 1320 (people per mile) x 18K (estimated earth circumference) the estimated people to circle the each hand in hand is around 24m (rounded up)
I think about 2/3 of the earth surface area is covered in water. This would mean that would mean that on average 16m from the 24m would be treading water.
However from memory that wasn't exactly half way around the earth from the UK so would estimate that you would need another few thousand miles to reach this point. Assuming then that this is halfway mark is about 9k miles away. This would mean that circumference of the earth is about 18k. miles
When I stand with my hands in the relaxed 'hand in hand' pose (not my own hands in order that other people can hold my hands) I estimate that the distance from one hand to the other is about 4ft. As there are 5280 ft in a mile this would mean that a link of around 1320 people would fit into a mile distance.
If we multiply the 1320 (people per mile) x 18K (estimated earth circumference) the estimated people to circle the each hand in hand is around 24m (rounded up)
I think about 2/3 of the earth surface area is covered in water. This would mean that would mean that on average 16m from the 24m would be treading water.
How many adults in the UK currently own a chicken?
For our purposes will assume an adult is anyone over the age of 16. From memory the population of the UK is around 61m. I think about 1/5 of the population will be under 16 so there should be roughly 48m adults in the UK.
I personally consume about 1 chicken per fortnight or 26 chickens per year.
As I do my shopping fortnightly and eat my chicken at some point during that time I have the chicken stored in my freezer or fridge on average for around a week or so.
This means for a typical year I will own a chicken for 26 weeks in total. At other points in the week I will be eating or gestating the bird but will own uneaten poultry for half the year give or take.
So if we take me as the sample and extrapolate to the rest of the UK adult population in any given year we get:
48m (population/2 (half the year) = 24
I estimate somewhere in the order of 24m adults in the UK currently own a chicken.
I personally consume about 1 chicken per fortnight or 26 chickens per year.
As I do my shopping fortnightly and eat my chicken at some point during that time I have the chicken stored in my freezer or fridge on average for around a week or so.
This means for a typical year I will own a chicken for 26 weeks in total. At other points in the week I will be eating or gestating the bird but will own uneaten poultry for half the year give or take.
So if we take me as the sample and extrapolate to the rest of the UK adult population in any given year we get:
48m (population/2 (half the year) = 24
I estimate somewhere in the order of 24m adults in the UK currently own a chicken.
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