Chopstork

During the course of creating our paper mache masterpiece for last year’s Bay to Breakers, we got into a discussion that we never really settled: You make a big volcano (or big cow) with buckets inside and tubes coming out through which you and your friends will suck hot molten magma (or “milk”). Which is easier to suck the magma/milk through—a fatter tube or a skinnier tube? Discuss.

Yeah yeah, another writing about poo? Tell people to quit leaving their crap (literally) everywhere and I’ll stop writing about it.

There was a semicircular smudge of what I assume was poo on the toilet seat. WHY?

The figure below shows a toilet with it’s critical dimension, the hole. Also shown is the mating part, the mystery pooper. Let’s call it a press fit for the poo in the person. The goal here is to clear the toilet’s hole. Diameter of the hole is nominally 8.5 in. 8.5 - 1.0 = 7.5 MMC. 7.5 - .5 = 7 virtual condition. Poo is 1.0 + .5 = 1.5 on the big side. 7 - 1.5 = 5.5 inches. Mystery pooper has to hit a 5.5 inch target at worst. If he poops smaller, he can be that much further off-center. That is very doable. Millions of people do it every day. There should be no poo on the toilet seat. Please.

Dan, Britt, Laura, and I started trying to figure out how big a google is. A googol is “1” with a hundred “0”s. That is a lot. What’s there a googol of on earth? Ants? Grains of sand? Dan said nothing; said there aren’t even a googol atoms on earth. The rest of us politely disagreed. Not a googol on all of Earth!? A mole is 6.02×10^23 molecules, and a mole of salt is nothing. Surely a googol atoms exist on Earth. After much googling, Dan found that there are only 4×10^79 hydrogen atoms in the UNIVERSE. And hydrogen is 90% of the universe. So we lost. There are a googol of nothing on Earth.

But that is almost a googol hydrogen atoms…right? We next considered the parts of the atom. There are about 10^9 photons and neutrinos for each hydrogen atom, more googling tells us. That gets us to 10^88 photons, neutrinos, and hydrogen atoms. Sounds close, but it’s not. We still need one trillion universes to get a googol of those atom parts!!! DAMN! That order of magnitude stuff really messes you up. No wonder they invented log-log paper.

Next we got a little abstract and counted time. How many nano seconds since the beginning of the universe? 10^9 nanoseconds per second * 10^2 seconds per minute * 10^2 minutes per hour * 10^1 hours per day * 10^3 days per year * 10^10 years since the creation of the universe = 10^27 nanoseconds. NOT EVEN CLOSE!!! And that is overestimating. Then, the geniuses we are, we figured it out. There are a googol one-googoliths of a second in one second. In the time you read this, about 45 googol googoliths of a second went by. You can read our paper in the next issue of the journal Nature.