What useful visual ways or analogies are there to convoy “parts per million?”
Like, a cup of Kool Aid poured into a family swimming pool? (Are there 1 million cups of water in that sort of pool?)
A big mansion-full of purple gas released in the Superdome stadium?
Etc. Etc.
Dollars? What can you buy with $1 vs $1 million…
An Olympic size pool measures: 50 meters long, 25 meters wide, and a minimum of 2 meters deep.
This converts to 660,430.1339 U.S. gallons. At 16 cups per gallon, we’re talking 10,566,880 cups.
Your cup runneth over.
1 drop = 0.05ml
20 drops = 1 ml
20,000 drops = 1 litre
75,700 drops = 1 US gallon
302,800 drops = 1 x 4US gallon bucket
1,000,000 drops = 3.3 buckets = 13.2 US Gallons
A US keg of beer is 15.5 gallons so 1ppm is approx 1.2 of drops of beer per keg or a drop in 3.3 buckets.
How precise do you want to be? There’s always the old phrase “a drop in the ocean”.
One person in San Jose CA (pop 1,025,350) or one person in Austin TX (pop 947,890). Not exactly one million, but pretty close. Source.
Use a convoy!
far easier with metric and more understandable across the world
50 x 25 x 2 = 2500 cubic metres of water
A cubic metre contains (100 x 100 x 100) 1 million cc of water or 1000 litres
so a half litre bottle of coke tipped into an olympic-sized swimming pool is the equivalent of 1 part in (1000/0.5 x 2500) 5 million and a larger 2 litre bottle gets you close to 1 ppm
I generally describe it as 3 drops in a bathtub full of water.
One million days covers most of recorded history (2740 years).
Dennis
Wait a minute, that was just a thousand screamin’ trucks (an’ eleven long-haired Friends o’ Jesus in a chartreuse micra-bus, 10-4.)
As an engineer, I’m fairly literal-minded, so:
1 ppm = 1 mg/kg
i.e. one part per million equals 1 milligram per kilogram
Or 1 gram / metric ton, which I think is easier to visualize.
That would be 1 ml per ton of water.
One drop in the entire Atlantic Ocean would be about 1 part in 10 quadrillion. That’s ten trillion times smaller than 1 ppm.
I appreciate your literal-minded engineerness, but for most people, this is not any more useful than the original 1 PPM description. The goal is to express this quantity using everyday items that non-engineers find familiar and can relate to.
For example, most folks are familiar with a gallon, and most folks are familiar with an inch. So take a cube of water 1/16 of an inch on a side: that’s about one millionth of a gallon.
This here is a nice demonstration of ink in water (about how to picture why CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are significant) to show that something being at parts per million in a solution is something that can have a big impact.
[QUOTE]Dan Miller
Published on Mar 7, 2010
I use ink to demonstrate how CO2 can have a big impact on warming the earth even though it is a very small percent of the atmosphere.
[/QUOTE]
You are very close.
My own average-sized pool holds 18,500 gallons of water (all pool owners know their size because of the need to calculate chemical adds).
18,500 gal / 1,000,000 = 0.0185 gal
0.0185 gal * 128 oz/gal is about 2.4 oz.
So it’s about the size of one of those tiny Dixie cups you find in bathrooms.
If you’re okay being a bit crass about it, this page translates fecal coliform counts into the more intuitive units “buttwipes per swimming pool” (or per bathtub, or per bottle :eek:, depending on the counts). Gives quantitative derivations and everything.
Once when I was trying to illustrate the generations of man (related to evolution) I decided that a screen door demonstrated it pretty well — with each square representing a generation of 20 years. I forget the details now. BUT, standard screening has an 18x16 mesh for 288 squares per square inch.
A rectangle of screening 48” x 73” will put you around 1,009,000. You can carry it under your arm.
Or as the old joke goes, there are a billion people in China. So even if you are a one-in-a-million kind of guy, there are still 1,000 other people just like you.
I think many of us could picture a ten-by-ten arrangement of people standing. And we could with some difficulty imagine a vast field on which there was an arrangement of one hundred by one hundred of these groups. That’s (10*10)100100= one million. So, just one of those people in that whole crowd.
