Questions that Cecil has thought about for 12 years

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
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At the bottom of the article How can waves be crashing on all sides of an island at once?, there are some questions that have been “thought about” for over a decade now. Here are my attempts at answers. Please, fact-check me.

That probably depends on what cut of the whale you’re measuring the butter against. Horribly, this method (cutting up into foot-cubed segments) is how we can approximate a whale’s total weight. They used to do exactly that back in the 1950s. However, while the paper describes the methodology, I didn’t see the raw data for each individual piece that the author used to come up with the approximations.

So, approaching from the other side: a blue whale, at 98 ft x 10 ft x 10 ft is approximately 200 tons. A similarly-sized chunk of butter (at 2 cups per 1 lb) would be (if my math is right) 5864 lbs.

Someone must have seen this article in 2006, because there was a study in 2007. The salient point of the article is:

There were reported differences between people who had been born deaf vs those who became deaf later in life, but it turns out that your mind is willing to adapt.

Sort of? In the late fourth century BCE, Socrates was convicted of being atheos, which translates to “refusing to acknowledge the gods recognized by the state.”

Technically, the idea of life without (or rejecting) gods could be said to begin with Buddhism, as there are no gods to worship in that religion, and it’s all about the betterment of the self. That has origins in sixth century BCE, so predates Socrates by two centuries.

Atheism as a movement doesn’t seem to have really taken off until the sixteenth century, when we see the term “athéisme” coined in France. The word “atheist” shows up in some documents in England shortly thereafter.

XKCD covered this better than I ever could.

If you don’t want to click on the link: maybe decrease by a few microns. Less so if you squeeze them out first.

This seems to be conflation of two separate people, neither one of whom was ever in Italy.

The first, and definitely the most famous, is Michel Lotito a French entertainer who ate all manner of strange objects, from bicycles to airplanes. As far as I can tell, he never ate a car.

The second is Leon Samson, an Australian strongman. He could reportedly bend steel bars with his eyelids (!!!), though it did give him a black eye to do so. Once, on a bet, he started to eat a car, but never only got as far as the outer body before abandoning the project.

Lotito died of natural causes in 2007. I haven’t found an obituary for Samson, so I assume he’s still alive and kicking.

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You’re off by a factor of 100. 98 ft x 10 ft x 10 ft = 9800 ft[sup]3[/sup] = 1,173,000 (US) cups. At 2 cups per lb, that’s 586,500 lb or 293 (US) tons.

I can bend steel bars with my eyelids too, provided the bars are thin enough.

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But what the bars are doing with my eyelids, I’ll never know.

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Thank you for the correction! I was always bad at math.

The 10 ft is an approximation; I can’t find the width or height of a blue whale anywhere. That makes the density calculation a little suspicious. Someone better at Googling than I may get better numbers.

I take it as typical professional strongman talk, which is bravado mixed with showmanship. Everyone seems to have learned quite a bit from P T Barnum.

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I remember years and years ago cecil would …have a "things were still thinking about " when the column needed filler that either were rhetorical or ridiculous…

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Obviously it does depend on which cut. Bones = heavier. Lungs = Lighter, so there’s probably no single answer.

But, Eureka, we can get an answer for a whale vs a whale-sized butter statue. Good old Archimedes helps us out here.

We know that butter is less dense than fresh water – it floats, with a moderate amount of the butter above the surface. Now, a whale’s buoyancy is complicated, since it changes as they exhale, and as their lungs compress at depth, both making them less buoyant. But even with full lungs at the surface, they don’t really float much above the water; and in the most relaxed /neutral position (dead) they sink. Which means the average density of a whale for my purposes is close to or slightly below seawater. And seawater is more dense than fresh water.

Therefore, I’m pretty convinced that butter is less dense than a whole whale. So, on average over a whole whale, the cubic foot of butter should weigh less than the cubic foot of whale.

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I agree with your excellent logic. Whale flesh must be denser than sea water, or else whales couldn’t submerge with lungs full of air. Butter must be less dense than fresh water because it floats. Butter < fresh water < salt water < whale flesh, therefore butter weighs less than whale flesh. QED.

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Reported.