So, would these answers be in the ball park?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
What's special about
Jan 25, 2010
Who's Checking Us Owd?
Amee'z Flowah Kollecshun
Amee'z Flowah Kollecshun iz a kollecshun ov Amee'z flowah picchas frum 2005 tah da present. Amee uzed key wurds in da metadata saved wid each piccha tah organize dem into a kollecshun. Da entire kollecshun consists ov 491 picchas! Da 67 in da slide shoo r edited down tah da best picchas. |
Cowndown
Jan 25, 2010
Toby's Vokabluary Status
My Links
What's in a nayme?
Wellcum tah mye nu blog! Da nayme Interpres iz da Latin wurd foah 'translator'. Dais blog iz dedicated tah dranzlading dings frum Inglish tah Tobee Speek. Tobee Speek, corrupting da Inglish langwij wun wurd at a tyme.
Contributors
Blog Archive
-
▼
2009
(200)
-
▼
September
(12)
- ' HAPPY FALL TO YOU'From one pumpkin to another!!!...
- See if you can figure out what these words have in...
- Calculations for Tiny-c's Pumpkins from Max
- The Great Terra Tiny Pumpkin Weigh Off
- test this
- Cityscape
- Speedy Monkey
- first day of school
- New Haven 20K
- Visitors to Interpres (per Birdie)
- Speedy Monkey
- Oh My God, Charlie Darwin
-
▼
September
(12)
2 comments:
Impressive. And, except for a couple of minor things, correct. Well done. Your answers for the average weight of the pumpkins and the volume of the big pumpkin are correct. It might interest you to know, due to sloppy handwriting and careless arithmetic, I got the average weight question wrong.
"Word problems" like this are the bane of many a HS and college student. Solving them requires translating English into Math. Not easy. The earliest step in this one which involved subtracting the weight of Lee from the weight of Lee with pumpkin to get the weight of the pumpkin may seem "trivial" but, trust me, not everyone would get this.
There actually is an exact formula for the volume of an ellipsoid which is
4/3*3.14*a*b*c
where a, b and c are the three different radii. In our case a=4.5, b=4.5 and c=6. This formula can be seen as reasonable because if a=b=c we have a sphere.
If you compute the volume of our little ellipsoidal pumpkin by the above formula you get
4/3*3.14*(4.5)^2*6 = 508.93
I used my own hint and multiplied the volume of the big (well, not that big, but work with me) pumpkin by the ratio of the pumpkin weights to get the volume of the little pumpkin.
15.2/22.6*4/3*3.14*6^3 = 608.52
which is very close to your estimate. Your idea of coming up with an "average radius" is very clever.
There's about a 100 cubic inch difference between the volumes we come up with and the volume one gets when using the above formula. 100 out of 508 is about 20 percent. But we're in the right "ball park." Both my weight proportion technique and your "average radius" method are basically approximations so we should expect the answers we get to be estimates.
Not only that but my measurements of 12 inches and 9 inches were very crude as well.
Not to be philosophical or anything but the most interesting thing I come away with from this one is
Reality is an average taken over countless possibilities.
Nice job, Chip.
PS - It just occurred to me: find a fish tank, fill it w/ water to a depth of 1 foot then put the big guy in it and measure the new depth. Do the arithmetic to get the volume of water displaced by the pumpkin. Do the same thing for the little pumpkin. This would get rid of most of the errors generated by my crude measurements.
Consider this a "thought experiment." Einstein was big on these.
Thanks Tinyc. Your fish tank water displacement idea is impressive as well. Good idea!
Post a Comment