Thursday, June 20, 2013

Some number that I'm not sure of exactly, but is slightly less than 1 million

The island of Manhattan is slightly less than 1 million inches long.

2 comments:

  1. Now just who the heck measured that'n out? I had a sudden picture of using inchworms to do this. So I did some calculations based on what I found on the net. For this to work, one must assume the name "inchworm" is a literal description, and assume that there is no delay in one inchworm picking up where and when the one before it left off:

    1) the segment of an inchworm's life from larva to pupa, the time we're used to seeing the inchworm do it's characteristic crawl, is 2-4 weeks. I used 3 just as an easy average.

    http://www.ehow.com/about_6122809_inchworm-life-cycle.html



    2) An earthworm can crawl at the rate of 0.0001 meters per second.

    http://www.chacha.com/question/how-fast-can-a-inchworm-go

    So we use 1,000,000 inches to make it easy.

    1,000,000 inches is 25400 meters.

    If an inchworm can move 0.001 inches in a minute, that's .0000254 meters in that time period.

    If I'm figuring this right, it would take 10,000,000 seconds for an inchworm to crawl one meter, therefore 254,000,000,000 seconds to crawl from one end of Manhattan to the other.

    Accounting for the differences in numbers of days in months, and leap years, etc, we find an average number of 2,629,800 seconds in a month.

    This means it would take a little more than 96,585 months for an inchworm to make the trek.

    This means we would need a total of 32,195 inchworms to complete the measurement. :)

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