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Contest Winner: Bathtub Challenge


I posted a contest yesterday, which Craig won (yet again). I will send him some more classical music CDs. (He informed me earlier this week that the box with his previous prize arrived in the mail, but with no contents. He got an empty box covered with red stamps proclaiming "Damaged by the Post Office." Sad.)

My odd behavior in the video was prompted by a conversation on Sunday morning with my darling wife. I came downstairs in the morning to find her sitting on a chair in the living room drinking some tea. I sat down on the couch.

Katie: Good morning!

Me: Good morning!

Katie: You are very large!

Me (forlornly rubbing my belly): I guess I did have a large dinner last night.

Katie: No, silly! I mean you take up a lot of space in the room.

Me: Huh?

Katie: Before you were here there was just empty space. Now that you're here there's much less.

This scintillating morning conversation led me to wonder how many cubic feet of living room space I actually take up. I'm six feet tall, but my average cross section seemed likely to be less than a square foot. Katie guessed four cubic feet. I guessed closer to five. I tried to calculate it using the bathtub, but I ran into two problems. First, my wax pencil was designed for filling small holes in blond woodwork, and I couldn't see the mark it made. (You can see me sadly trying to find it as soon as I emerge from the water in the video.) I don't have a proper grease pencil. Second, when I submerged my head, a bunch of water ran down the upper drain (under the chrome plate in the video). That would add lots of error to my volume measurement. I abandoned my plan to replace the displaced water to measure exactly, and I just did some estimating.

My calculations say I'm around 3 cubic feet, much smaller than I had estimated.

Comments

  1. J-W Maessen7:01 AM

    What's that in gallons? :-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous4:17 PM

    A cubic foot of water weighs about 62 pounds. If you assume that your density is roughly that of water, three or four sounds about right.

    ReplyDelete
  3. J. Michael Andresen9:10 AM

    That's a good point. It would have been easier to take my weight and estimate my density. I was really keen on being very exact, though. I was sad when my plans didn't work out like I hoped.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous10:16 AM

    Good thing you are having kids.

    ReplyDelete

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