Useless Facts

[jsanders]

The numbers are just estimates, of course, .

So it could be off by, say, 3 orders of magnitude?

 

[Kraj]

So it could be off by, say, 3 orders of magnitude?

I really have no idea what the actual variance is.

I just realized I answered the wrong question about stars. Here's a link that explains a bit more detail:

Dr Simon Driver said the number was drawn up based on a survey of one strip of sky, rather than trying to count every individual star.

The team used two of the world's most powerful telescopes, one at the Anglo-Australian Observatory in northern New South Wales state and one in the Canary Islands, to carry out their survey.

Within the strip of sky some 10,000 galaxies were pinpointed and detailed measurements of their brightness taken to calculate how many stars they contained.

That number was then multiplied by the number of similar sized strips needed to cover the entire sky, Driver said, and then multiplied again out to the edge of the visible universe.

 

[msp]

I really have no idea what the actual variance is.

I just realized I answered the wrong question about stars. Here's a link that explains a bit more detail:

Yes I would of been very suprised if there were more atoms in a human than in a star... esp as we are made of star dust,,,

 

[Kraj]

Yes I would of been very suprised if there were more atoms in a human than in a star...

I'm sorry if I was unclear...I was saying the number of atoms in the average human body is 100,000 times greater than the number of stars in the known universe, not the number of atoms in a star (which, for an average star, happens to be pretty close to the square of the number of atoms in the average human body).

It breaks down like this:
# of stars in the known universe: 7x10^22
# of atoms in the average human body: 7x10^27
# of atoms in an average-size star: 1x10^57

 

[jsanders]

I'm sorry if I was unclear...I was saying the number of atoms in the average human body is 100,000 times greater than the number of stars in the known universe, not the number of atoms in a star (which, for an average star, happens to be pretty close to the square of the number of atoms in the average human body).

It breaks down like this:
# of stars in the known universe: 7x10^22
# of atoms in the average human body: 7x10^27
# of atoms in an average-size star: 1x10^57

Are you on Drugs?

How in any universe could a star only contain the square of the number of atoms as a human?

A star is usually made of hydrogen compressed to the point of fusion and a human is about a gazillion times smaller.

 

[Rich]

Are you on Drugs?

Aspirin?

 

[Rich]

A star is usually made of hydrogen compressed to the point of fusion and a human is about a gazillion times smaller.

I could name quite a few that mainly consist of hot air

 

[Kraj]

Are you on Drugs?

No.

How in any universe could a star only contain the square of the number of atoms as a human?

Because when you're dealing with numbers as huge as counting atoms, squaring them produces unbelieveably huge numbers.

7x10^27^2 = 7x10^54

That's close enough to 1x10^57 for my statement to be acceptably accurate. And to be precise, a star is not a gazillion times bigger than a human, it's approx. 10^30 times bigger, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times bigger. Or you could say if an average person weighs 150 pounds, then an average star weighs about 150 trillion trillion pounds. (*I used pounds to put the example in perspective for an American reader, even though it is not an real measure to use. A measure that determines mass, not weight (such as kilograms), would actually be appropriate.

 

[jsanders]

No.


Because when you're dealing with numbers as huge as counting atoms, squaring them produces unbelieveably huge numbers.

7x10^27^2 = 7x10^54

That's close enough to 1x10^57 for my statement to be acceptably accurate. And to be precise, a star is not a gazillion times bigger than a human, it's approx. 10^30 times bigger, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times bigger. Or you could say if an average person weighs 150 pounds, then an average star weighs about 150 trillion trillion pounds.

I was just in the shower rethinking this. Maybe I’m the one with the drug problem.

Anyway according to your calculations the sun's volume has space for as many humans, as we have for atoms.

Have you run the numbers using a constant like salt water just to see if it is in the same order?

 

[Kraj]

Anyway according to your calculations the sun's volume has space for as many humans, as we have for atoms.

Well, number of atoms is quite different than volume. I'd have to look up the sun's radius to determine that number, but considering the sun's radius is 100 times the Earth's, you're probably pretty close.

Have you run the numbers using a constant like salt water just to see if it is in the same order?

I'm not sure what you mean. (Salt water isn't a very good constant, by the way.)

...I'm off to lunch. Don't be offended if I don't respond for awhile

 

[Andromeda]

Useless Info: but Usefull info to me: I can't wait to go home and sleep the whole day...

 

[Rich]

Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia is the fear of long words.
A snail can sleep for 3 years.
The average human eats 8 spiders in their lifetime at night.
More people are killed by donkeys annually than are killed in plane crashes.
Cat's urine glows under a black light.
Nutmeg is extremely poisonous if injected intravenously.
After the Civil War the U.S. sued Great Britain for damages that were caused by them building ships for the Confederacy

 

[jsanders]

After the Civil War the U.S. sued Great Britain for damages that were caused by them building ships for the Confederacy

And the British still can’t resist putting in there 2 cents. hehehe

 

[TessB]

The average human eats 8 spiders in their lifetime at night.

I did NOT need to know that.

 

[Rich]

An American aircraft in Vietnam shot itself down with one of its own missiles.
In 1647 the English Parliament abolished Christmas.

When George I became King of England in 1714, his wife did not become Queen. He placed her under house arrest for 32 years
The Puritans forbade the singing of Christmas Carols, judging them to be out of keeping with the true spirit of Christmas.
In the 1970's, the Rhode Island Legislature in the US entertained a proposal that there be a $2 tax on every act of sexual intercourse in the State.

A pig's orgasm lasts for 30 minutes.
A pig's penis is shaped like a corkscrew.
If you are an average American, in your whole life, you will spend an average of 6 months waiting at red lights.
Your fingernail has the same ingredients as fly poop
2nd term Presidents in America are known as lame ducks

 

[Rich]

I did NOT need to know that.

 

[FoFa]

The rootkit of all evil: As if foisting Mariah Carey on us wasn’t bad enough; Sony BMG Music Entertainment has been caught installing a rootkit -- a tool typically used by malware. If you play a copy-protected Sony CD on your PC, it installs a digital rights management scheme you can neither detect nor remove. After security wonks revealed the rootkit could be used to compromise systems merely by appending the prefix “$sys$” to the name of any rogue program, Sony and software partner First 4 Internet issued a steady stream of denials, along with a patch that removes the rootkit. Everybody in the music biz wants to be a gangsta, but Sony seems to be taking those dreams literally.

It’s only grok ’n’ roll: File-swapping network Grokster has closed its doors and agreed to pay $50 million in damages to the record companies (although, given Grokster’s subzero bank account, the companies may have to accept payment in Monopoly money). So, to recap: Making it possible for consumers to illegally swap music is very bad. Making it possible for hackers to illegally hijack your computer, however, is just an average day in the record business.

 

[jsanders]

The rootkit of all evil: As if foisting Mariah Carey on us wasn’t bad enough; Sony BMG Music Entertainment has been caught installing a rootkit -- a tool typically used by malware. If you play a copy-protected Sony CD on your PC, it installs a digital rights management scheme you can neither detect nor remove. After security wonks revealed the rootkit could be used to compromise systems merely by appending the prefix “$sys$” to the name of any rogue program, Sony and software partner First 4 Internet issued a steady stream of denials, along with a patch that removes the rootkit. Everybody in the music biz wants to be a gangsta, but Sony seems to be taking those dreams literally.

It’s only grok ’n’ roll: File-swapping network Grokster has closed its doors and agreed to pay $50 million in damages to the record companies (although, given Grokster’s subzero bank account, the companies may have to accept payment in Monopoly money). So, to recap: Making it possible for consumers to illegally swap music is very bad. Making it possible for hackers to illegally hijack your computer, however, is just an average day in the record business.

I thought all you Republicans wanted the mega-corps to rule the world.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

As to how you count atoms in a human body, it is the same way as you count cows in a field while watching from a train window.

For the cows: Count the teats and divide by four.

For human atoms: Mostly carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen, with a little bit of hydrogen tossed it. So count the electrons and divide by about 16.

See? It's easy when you know how!

 

[Kraj]

I did NOT need to know that.

Put your mind at ease, it's not true.

In a 1993 PC Professional article, columnist Lisa Holst wrote about the ubiquitous lists of "facts" that were circulating via e-mail and how readily they were accepted as truthful by gullible recipients. To demonstrate her point, Holst offered her own made-up list of equally ridiculous "facts," among which was the statistic cited above about the average person's swallowing eight spiders per year, which she took from a collection of common misbeliefs printed in a 1954 book on insect folklore. In a delicious irony, Holst's propagation of this false "fact" has spurred it into becoming one of the most widely-circulated bits of misinformation to be found on the Internet.