
so could this thing lift the Brooklyn Bridge?
they missed a trick - couldve had a bigger comparison:
I'd imagine the whole city of New York has a lower PSI footprint than that given that the rest of it isn't on stilts
The BBC's improbable measurement unit is on top form this week, in this report on a monster snake which terrorised the prehistoric South American jungle. The Titanoboa - a distant relative of the feared anaconda - weighed in at over a tonne and measured 14m (46ft) from snout to tail. In common with its venomless modern cousin …
"the equivalent of lying under the weight of one-and-a-half times the Brooklyn Bridge".
This makes no sense at all. The units don't match. The weight of the Brooklyn Bridge is surely a unit measured in force whilst pressure is force per unit area. Of course it might be that the BBC is talking about the pressure at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge's suspension towers, but as it stands it is complete nonsense.
"I think the implication is weight of the BB spread over surface area of you."
Well the Brooklyn Bridge is reported as weighting about 14,680 tons, or about 32.9 million pounds. As they report this as being equivalent to 1.5 Brooklyn Bridges, then that becomes about 49.3 million pounds. At 400 pounds per square inch, that comes out at 123,312 square inches. An average man has a BSA (body surface area) of about 1.9 sq metres, or 2,945 square inches. So that would be out by a factor of over forty to one.
Of course constrictors don't work over the entire body surface anyway.
In all, the BBC's numbers are bonkers and it's unclear how they were derived.
Ground pressure is inversely proportional to the footprint of the object. To compare the constricting force exerted by a snake to the ground pressure of any object is plain stupid, especially if the footprint is not stated.
Just out of Wikipedia: ground pressure of ...
M1 Abrams tank: 15 psi
Mountain bicycle: 40 psi
Now imagine being crushed by a mountain bike.
Now please feel free to point out any elementary mistakes I made but my back of an envelope calculations don't come anywhere near to theirs.
to work out the equivalent weight lying on top of you to give a pressure of 400lbs per sq inch:
Area of person lying down: assume 72 inches (6ft) tall and 30 inches wide and approximating that a person lying down is a uniform rectangle gives total area of 2160 sq inches. Multiply by 400lbs gives 864000 lbs or 391904 Kg or about 392 tons. Weight of Brooklyn bridge is approx 14,680 tons so it actually equated to 0.0267 Brooklyn Bridges.
Have I made some fundamental mistake or are they just making shit up?
> What's that in UK creme eggs?
2,939,278,400.
Note the 'UK creme egg' unit refers to the amount of sugar (25g) in the confection rather than the whole egg (39g). If you want it in actual UK creme eggs then the figure is 2,449,398,667.
This is 9.7 (or 8.2 for the full egg) years worth of creme egg production at current rates.
> so surely this should be in US Creme Eggs
I was translating to metric, but fair enough.
That's 2,161,234,118 34g US creme eggs, which incidentally is 75.6 Olympic swimming pools or 1.9 Albert Halls.
BTW; I cocked up on the UK creme eggs conversion, it should be 1,884,152,821 39g UK creme eggs representing 6.2 years production.
Hello Kitty (who has no mouth, mind you) destroyer of worlds. I do have to give the Japanese credit where credit is due: After being bombed, burned, nuked, washed away, as well as the point of origin of some of the wierdest shit the world has ever seen, they are tough and will probably out live us all.
Ok, hook taken ...
1 Brooklyn bridge=14,680 tonnes
1 London Eye=2100 tonnes
So the equivalent is 6.99 London Eyes ...
or, according to the "88 Trillion Facts You Never Wanted to Know About the Bleedin' Wheely Thing" web site, that's the equivalent of 1272 london cabs per wheeely thing ... that's 8891 London cab's worth ... I assume it's an unloaded FX4 so I haven't allowed for "blimey gov, I'm such a fat cabbie I've lost the steering wheel" or "sorry me' old china, you and your tribe are such huge geezers you'll barely fit through the door and might put me overweight"
Constrictors kill by squeezing with sufficient force that the pressure in the thoracic cavity is larger than the heart muscle can overcome, basically inducing cardiac arrest. (I saw it on the Internet, so it must be true.)
I might have missed something, but is Jennifer Lopez starring in Titanoboa vs. Megashark?
Because funbags are suceptable to the vageries of improbability physics (eg: you think you're going to get hold of one or more but don't allways manage it for some reason) a definative measurement using this unit will not be posibble till the El Reg research team can define the elusive BSH (British Standard Handful) constant.