Funny Things Kids Say
I asked my 3-year-old son what he did in Sunday School last week. He said
the listened to a story about Jesus. When I asked what Jesus was doing in the
story, he replied “Just exercising.”
78 comments October 23rd, 2006
Note: No trees were killed in the sending of this message, but a large -> number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.
94 comments July 29th, 2006
In a democracy it’s your vote that counts; in feudalism, it’s your Count that votes.
188 comments July 29th, 2006
A short fortuneteller who escaped from prison: a small medium at large.
739 comments July 26th, 2006
A grenade fell onto a kitchen floor in France, resulted in linoleum Blown apart.
31 comments July 26th, 2006
Think about the Cows
An interesting use of logic by slackmaster2000 on slashdot.org:
(thanks to Todd for passing this along)
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So let’s say that your TV couldn’t be turned on by remote control (because it’s energy efficient and off means off), thus requiring that you walk all the way over to the set, extend your arm, push the button, retract your arm, and walk back to the sofa. For the sake of argument, let’s say that on average, this activity requires approximately one calorie per day per household in the US. So per household, that’s 365 calories per year. Since I’m just making stuff up, let’s also assume that there are 150 million television-bearing households.
The amount of energy required then to manually turn on the television
in the US alone is 54.75 BILLION calories.
In the US we pretty much only eat hamburgers. A single 1/4 pound lean
beef patty contains 290 calories. So the number of beef patties
required to power US citizens for the sole task of turning the
television on and off by hand is 188,793,103.
Folks, that’s almost 189 MILLION quarter pound beef patties. That’s
47.25 MILLION pounds of beef.
Using my keen powers of google, I’ve determined that the average
amount of beef we get from a single cow is just about 500 pounds.
Hold on to your buns, because this is going make your mustard: the
number of cows required to power US humans for an entire year of
turning the TV on and off without the assistance of a remote control is 94,500.
Nintey four thousand five hundred cows.
Now prepare to be exagerated into oblivion. I’m about as knowledgable
about ranching as you are about energy production, but from what I’m
able to google, it looks like a single cow is probably going to eat
from 4 to 10 acres of grass per year. Now cows do have a tendancy to
grow before reaching maturity, and little cows probably don’t eat as
much as big cows, but it does look like beef cows get to live for
just about two years. We also have to consider that we need to
maintain one heffer per calf until cloning technology becomes more
advanced. So I think we can safely say that for each cow, we’re going
to require 10 acres of grass per year.
That’s 945,000 acres of grass per year required to turn our
televisions on and off the old fashioned way.
That’s a lot of grass. 1,476 square miles to be precise. People,
that’s the entire state of Rhode Island. Enough land for over
1,000,000 people to live and play.
Now it should be clear to everyone that if we figure out how much
nitrogen and water and other various stuff is required per grazing
acre, we’ll end up with some really big numbers. Let’s just say the
numbers are definately going to be in the millions, and that’s
definately not small.
So, I think I’ve made my point. The next time you think about those 2
watts of wasted energy here and there and decide to multiply that
number until it’s a really big number, try to also think about the cows.
585 comments July 25th, 2006