How can we fit in all that fame?

"In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes." - Andy Warhol

I thought to myself, "Is it possible for everyone to see everyone else's fifteen minutes of fame?" The answer is clearly no. There are only 35 063 fifteen minute intervals in a year (on average). To see everyone (all 6 528 051 823 of us) currently on Earth's fifteen minute would take almost 186 181 years. Even limiting your fame to just the USA (300 921 905) still takes 8 582 years. With the life expectancy of 75 plus years the most fame that you could possibly witness is 2 670 225. Once you take into account working, eating, sleeping, daydreaming and duplicate fame viewings, I have to conclude that the audience for all these fifteen minutes of fame is going to be rather small. A realistic number of fame views per person per day would be about 4. That adds up to 102 267 fame viewings in a lifetime, which puts the average audience for each fame viewing world wide at 63 833 and 2 942 in just the USA.

Pondering the Giant Nerf

Somehow a 25 kg Nerf ball came up in a conversation with Thomas (such things are not uncommon). And in a fit of mathematics (my second in as many weeks). I figured out what it would be like.

First up: "How big would it be?" This is easy, measure the size and weight of a standard Nerf ball (45 mm diameter and 5 g mass) then the quick use of some cube ratio math to get the big boy's size. This came out to a huge 760 mm diameter sphere.

Second up: "What if it fell on your head?" This required a some wiki-based research to get a few equations and some searching for coefficient of drag of a sphere with a rough surface. After a few calculator button pushings the answer came out: 5 m/s or 18 km/h or 11 mph. The real world equivalent would be a small child running in to you really fast. This would hurt you, but probably not kill you. Probably.

1/1.6"?

Quick, which is bigger 1/2.3" or 1/1.8"? I spend way too much time looking at the latest digital cameras. And every time I do, I get beat in the head with these stupid inverse decimal diagonal measurements. I firmly believe that is a huge conspiracy designed specifically to annoy me.

Why can't they just call it 5/8" or 0.625" or 15.9mm. If we are lucky enough to know that the aspect ratio is 16:9, then we can use more math to get 0.306×0.545" or 7.78×13.8mm. I would call it 8×14mm. Everything you need to know in two numbers, so easy to compare with other cameras. Unfortunately if you try to compare that with a piece of 35mm film then you have to know that the 35mm is the width and the aspect ratio is 3:2, resulting a 35×23.3mm rectangle. And for those who are still playing along, here it is in the evil diagonal measurement speak: 42mm or 1.65" or 1/0.6".

"It's a mad house. A mad house." - Planet of the Apes.

Math Good

I was browsing through my collection of photos this afternoon when I came across this one. This picture was taken while waiting for the Apple Store in Glendale to open. I was there to take my PowerBook in to have its motherboard replaced thanks to that nifty defect in the ram slot that was far too common in my model. The iMac on the right would work for a minute then freeze up and restart. At the time I took this I was doing a project where I needed to sync movies playing on three Macs, so it was nice to see even Apple was having trouble creating a reliable way to do it.