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Welcome to Arts and Ideas in the Air, under the tent and around Baltimore, your
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daily news briefing from Arts and Ideas, all the goings ons around. It was a very
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pleasant day today. Some even said it was a little on the warm side. A little bit
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overcast right now, sunny earlier, quite pleasant here under the tent. We had our
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mandatory announcements today. We wrote off the year-long clerkships, which is
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going to be largely unchanged from last year, although it looks like Declan will
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be stepping up to do staff relations clerk, so that's cool. We will confirm all
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that in school meeting tomorrow. And let's see, we have age check-in meetings
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scheduled. We're going to start with a 16 plus on Wednesday around noon, so if
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you're 16 or over, you should be attending this meeting for online people.
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I believe it'll be held in the JC Voice channel. It'll certainly be announced
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beforehand. And for in-person, it'll be here under the tent. And if you're almost
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16, like maybe 15 and a half or older, you should probably come to these meetings
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too. We always like forward-looking meeting stuff, but it's sort of at your
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option which one to choose. In future weeks, we will be going down the
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kind of age list, so 12 to 15 next week, and then I guess 8 to 11, and then
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5 to 7. Alrighty, we had our first blue chair destruction. There was a little bit
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of a chair flipping and our new blue chairs got broken, so I had the
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distinct pleasure of disassembling it and then smashing the blue plastic into
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pieces to fit in the trash. That was fun. I love a good sledgehammer experience. I
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also dealt with recycling for the first time this year. As you probably know, in
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Baltimore City, we don't have recycling pickup right now, but we do have a
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lot a lot of blue bins that are cleaning people dropped off, and so stashed them
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neatly in there, making it convenient to bring to the drop-off center or simply
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stashing them until we have regular recycling. We'll see what happens. Online today, we
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had a Minecraft build session and discussion of the history lecture from
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last Wednesday. I assume they all both went very well. For the podcast, I am
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trying out something new. I have gotten a little foam wrapper for my microphone to
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block wind and puppy pop pop pop pop pop pop pop noises, so hopefully that is a
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little bit more pleasant to the ears without diminishing the sound too much.
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All right, I think that's the news of the day. Tomorrow we're having school meeting,
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which is always very exciting. We actually had two JC cases today, so that
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was fun. It's been a while, and yeah. All righty. Oh, I guess we also had a level
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three alert. A student had a sister who went to a child care facility that one
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of the staff there is being tested for COVID-19. That student staying home just
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to be safe. So far we don't have any news that it's anything to worry about, but we
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are always being vigilant about that. All right, so on to Millions Monday. So before
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beginning my problem of the day, or the week I guess, I wanted to mention a new
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app that I came across. It's from the, well in part, from the people who make the
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videos, Kurgeset videos. They're kind of like these animated cartoonish kind of
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videos on YouTube that explain some scientific either fact or sort of
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wonderings or whatever. I enjoy them a lot, and they kind of have like silly
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little animated birds that they have standing for people. I don't know, I like
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it. Anyway, they made an app with somebody
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else, and I believe it's called Universe in a Nutshell, and it's kind of cool. You,
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it just does scaling from like the plank length of 10 to the minus 35 meters or
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so, all the way up to the entire observable universe, which is I believe
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like 10 to the 26 meters. So like 50, well I guess 60, 60 orders of magnitude
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difference, and you have everything in between. So you go all the way up through
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you know the atoms and the viruses, bacteria, the people, the buildings, the
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planets, stars, the galaxies, the universe, the whole thing. It's pretty awesome. You
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just scale around, you zoom in and out, and you can click on the things and find
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some stuff about whatever is they're presenting. I think it's neat. And the
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iOS store, which is what I use, it was three bucks. So kind of neat. Anyway, on to the
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problem. So here's the question. It was inspired by the app. They had sort of a
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human cube where they just smushed all the humans together. I'm not gonna be
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quite that dramatic, but let's say you wanted to put all the humans on this
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planet within Baltimore City. How high would you have to stack them if you gave
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them, in pre-pandemic world, just a square foot to stand in basically? All right, so
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there's a number of ways we could go about this. Under the tent we have this
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10 gallon trash can, and so that looked roughly like something I could fit in.
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And so I stacked it up, and it's about three or four of me. So let's say it's 40
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gallons. Now this isn't a compacted human, it's just a human standing. So that's
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cool. And then, so you got 40 gallons, and that's about five cubic feet. So eight
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billion people, roughly, gives you 40 billion cubic feet. All right, now the
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size of Baltimore, well, the beltway is roughly a circle, and it roughly takes, I
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don't know, maybe an hour to get around, but sort of slow and fast and whatever.
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So I'm thinking the circumference, you know, is something like 30, 40 miles
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around. So if you had 30 mile circumference, divided by 6, give 5 miles
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across, and square that 25, and multiply it by the 3 of pi, and so 75, round up to
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100 square miles. So I'm going to go with 100 square miles area. I looked it up, it
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was 92 square miles for Baltimore City, so roughly close. Now to convert this into
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feet, well, 5,000 feet in a mile, roughly, I mean it's like, I don't know, 52 whatever,
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5,200 I mean, 5,000. 5,000 squared is about 25 million square feet. Multiply that by
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100 square miles, so you get roughly two and a half billion square feet. And so to
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get the 40 billion cubic feet, that's roughly kind of a little less than
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multiplying by 20, so 20 feet high, so that's about 3 or 4 humans high. So that
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is your human depth of filling Baltimore with all the population of humans in the
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world. So I'm not sure what use that is, but it sounds to me like we got a lot of
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room to grow. Alrighty, so that was Millions Monday. I'll see you all
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tomorrow for a little talk about Tuesday, another Sudbury topic of interest.
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Alright, have a good one, see you later.