Mathematics as a concept—not even a discipline, though that too—is one of those things that is both science but also magic at the same time.
Science, because, d’uh, but magic because just look at the kind of mind-boggling shenanigans you can get into by simply assuming that one divided by three is one third, and one third is 0.(3) and times 3 it’s 0.(9). Who Houdinied that extra 0.(1) away?!
But outside the wonder that this scientific “logic” provides, it’s pretty much useless. And you bet there’s a dedicated community around useless math online—well, useless, but interesting.
#1 A Natural Headache Cure
Image credits: AlanPlotzker
#2 What Does His Shirt Say
"The quote is "I'm sexy and I know it" sqrt(1+tan^2) can be verbalized as "sec" and so this formula is the "sec of c" "I'm sec C and I know it""
Image credits: tabanopro
#3 Is This True?
"They’re called crinkle crankles. A single leaf wall over that distance would need brick piers approx every 1.5-2m if it was a retaining wall it would need to be at least 9” wide (2 bricks). The crinkle crankle has more strength due to it’s curved nature so can be 4” wide or a single leaf of bricks. For the maths if we can assume they’re true semi-circles then each semi circle would be 1/2piD or 1.57D whereas a double leaf wall would be 2D for the same length D Therefore using 21.5% less bricks than a double leaf wall"
Image credits: stem_feed
#4 Approximately How Large Would The Car Have To Be In Order To Be That Curved?
"Quick eyeballing suggests a curvature of about 30°; that's 1/12th of a full circle, so given that the Earth's circumference is just over 40,000 km, the car would have to be about 3333 km long, or about the driving distance from Chicago to Los Angeles, or about 5.5 million washing machines (in case you're too American to understand kilometers)."
Image credits: CrazyPotato1535
#5 How Much Does This Kitten Weigh?
"One source says the “minimum actuation force” of a key is 47.6 grams. If we assume the kitten is standing on 4 keys (only one per paw) 4*47.6 is 190.4 grams or 0.4 pounds. Ao the kitten would be under that weight. It appears that the kitten is standing on more than 4 keys though so maybe 1/2 pound."
Image credits: g-amefreak
#6 How Many Combinations Of 9 Ingredients Are Possible. Using All 9 At Once Is Not Required
"Each ingredient can either be included or not -- that's 2 possibilities. Multiply out all 9 ingredients and we have 29 = 512 in total. I presume you'd want to exclude the 1 possibility where none of the ingredients are included, so that leaves 511."
Image credits: gracecamille_
#7 Is This True And If Yes How Deos It Work?
"Quite the opposite, it will leave you with less sandwich. Since no cut is perfect, some of the sandwich molecules will stay on the knife or there is more crumbs on the cutting board. Therefore, cutting on a diagonal (longest cut) will dislodge more material of the sandwich than cutting along shorter line"
Image credits: PleaseBeGneiss
#8 I’ve Always Wondered How Much Money Walt Actually Had
"Assuming those are $100 bill stacks at $10,000 each. I count 12 stacks across and 15 stacks deep and assuming that each stack is ~0.5 inches tall with a total height of ~30 inches. 12 * 15 * (30 / 0.5) * 10,000 = $108 Million dollars."
Image credits: Danny13oyy
#9 A Lot Of Paper, But How Much
"36,567,729 sheets of letter sized paper according to Excel (single sided) According to Google a pallet contains 200,000 sheets Therefore 182 pallets of paper would be needed. A photocopier can apparently print 500,000 sheets in its lifetime, so you would need 73 photocopiers"
Image credits: noideaman69
#10 How Many Rocks Would This Person Have To Throw To Flood Denmark?
"The total area of ocean is about 361 million square km, or 3.61 x 1014 square meters. The highest point of Denmark is about 171m. The earth is large enough that we can choose to ignore the curvature over a change of radius of 171m (compared to the radius of 6300km it’s less than a rounding error). What we can’t ignore is that there is about 30 million square km of land that is 171m or less above sea level which will also be flooded (estimating from a hypsographic curve). I’ll factor in a mean of half of that to give the new earths surface figure of 3.76 x 1014 square meters. This means that there would need to be 171 x 3.76 x 1014 = 6.43 x 1016 cubic meters of water displaced. If we assume a good throwing rock has a volume of 1 litre, then you would need 6.43 x 1019 rocks. At 1 rock per day that’s going to be 1.76 x 1017 years, or 12 900 000 times the age of the universe. If all 8 billion people on the world threw one rock per second, it would only take 250 years"
Image credits: stretch_armstrong_
#11 How Many Nickels Would It Take To Crush You?
"According to a google search, it takes about 4,000 newtons to crush a bone, & I’m going to assume that an average person has a frontal surface area of 1 m2 for ease. A nickel weighs 5 grams, which equates to about 0.05 newtons of gravitational force… you’d need at least 81,578 nickels on top of the person, or about $4,078.90"
Image credits: ropermarisa
#12 What Are The Odds?
"Beginner: 1 in 102 million Intermediate: 1 in 6.1 million Expert: 1 in 477,000"
Image credits: SMOKE1798
#13 How Much Would This Cool The Tea?
"Oh come on this is doable from an engineering point of view: One sip per second of 10ml (a shot glas' equivalent in a few seconds) 90°C tea, 0°C water (I see ice?), ∆T =90 Conduction in the thin straw is negligible, basically water-to-water heat transfer at a slow rate: the convection coëfficiënt for that is about 1000W/m²K (forced convection water to unforced water essentially) Straw is 5mm diameter, 150mm length is submerged. Total area = 5π*150 = 2350mm² heat exchange area. As such, the heat (power) transferred per second is = 9010002350/1e6 ≈ 211W 211W for 0.01kg water (tea) per second is ∆T = 211/4200/0.01 ≠ 5°C difference. This matches my experience: the straw is simply not big enough to offer proper area for heat exchange: Source: 10 years of steam boiler engineering Hope you enjoyed!"
Image credits: CEO_Of_Rejection_99
#14 How Fast Would You Need To Go To Successfully Complete The Loop?
"Im gonna assume the loop is about 60m based on the height of the building next to it. At the top of the circle, the two forces are mg and centripetal force. The two together equal ma (a being v2/r.) So mg + Fc = m(v2/r). Set Fc to 0 as you would have to have a centripetal force slightly above 0 to complete the loop. This gives us v2 = sqrt(gr). For a 60m loop (30m radius) v = 17.1m/s. This is the speed at the TOP of the loop. Using conservation of energy, we can say that 1/2mv2 + mgh = 1/2mv2 (the first part is top of loop, second part is bottom of loop). Cancel m and plug in numbers. You would have to travel 38.34m/s or 138kph (85.7mph) to make the loop."
Image credits: darthbane911
#15 If The Sun Turned Into A Black Hole Of Equivalent Mass, Would The Accretion Disk Disk Be Large Enough To Destroy The Earth? If Not, How Bright Would It Be?
"NASA did the math on this "If the Sun was replaced with a black hole that had the same mass as the Sun, the Schwarzschild radius would be 3 km (compared to the Sun's radius of nearly 700,000 km). Hence the Earth would have to get very close to get sucked into a black hole at the center of our Solar System.""
Image credits: Valdevia_Art
#16 How Much Would This Cost In That Time?
"He's a corporate executive of some sort and the trip was being paid for by the family member in Paris. His wife was also a fairly successful artist. A 800k house in Bay Area probably cost >5M today"
Image credits: LeRealGabrielGD
#17 As It Asks, Which One Is The Better Deal?
"A circle has 360 degrees, so 60/360 is 1/6th of a pizza, and 45/360 is 1/8. The area of a circle is (pi)r2 The area of the 6" pizza is 1/6(pi)(62 )=6(pi) The area of the 7" pizza is 1/8(pi)(72 )=6.125(pi) 6.125/6=1.021, so the 7" pizza is 2.1% bigger $1.70/$1.50 is 1.13, or 13% more expensive. The 7" pizza is 13% more expensive, but only 2.1% bigger, so the 6" pizza is a better deal."
Image credits: Par4d0xxxx
#18 How Much Force Is Superman’s Key Putting Down And Shouldn’t It Have Its Own Gravitational Pull?
"500,000 tons is its downward force due to gravity. It has a gravitational pull, but minimal compared to the earth (6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons)"
Image credits: Interesting_Judge863
#19 Is It True?
"If only contacting the floor with the heel then yes. An elephant's foot is 15-19 inches across, so assuming it's vaguely circular gives an area of at least 0.114m2 per foot. Elephants when walking depending on the gait will have 2/3 feet in contact with the floor - so that's at least 0.228m2 in contact with the floor. (Going for minimum area as this will give the highest pressure for the comparison) 6000lbs under Earth's gravity is a force of 26.7kN, which when divided by area for a pressure of ~117kPa - if it's just standing still this could actually be halved to approx 58kPa If a 100lb woman (445N) is standing on only her heels (~1cm2 x 2) this is a pressure of 2,224kPa which is indeed about 20 times higher than the elephant on 2 feet. However that's not really representative of how heels are worn, even the picture shown has the shoes in contact with at least 20x the area of the ground than just the heels"
Image credits: UberFacts
#20 Is This Claim Actually Accurate?
"Yes, a 33 round single elimination bracket would have 233 participants, which is about 8.5 billion. So it is actually possible, since the world pop is probably just under 8 billion, that the winner would be someone who had the 1st round bye and only had to win 32 times"
Image credits: FitFounder
#21 What Are The Actual Odds Of Winning 32 Hands Of Blackjack In A Row?
"I believe blackjack gives the house a 0.61% edge over the player on average when played absolutely perfectly. Assuming the same odds for every game, .493932 leads me to a .000000000157% chance of winning 32 games in a row."
Image credits: Mammoth_Hippo8930
#22 How Large Would This Bat Need To Be To Fit The Signatures Of Everyone Alive?
"Rough estimate: 8 *109 people , Assuming a 10 cm2 signature/person to make the numbers easy. This comes from a 10cm long signature 1 cm in width. Gives 8*1010 cm2 = 8*106 m2 in area. If we model the bat as a cylinder of length L, the surface area is SA = 2 pi r2 + 2 pi r *L, so if the bat has a length of 1 meter to fit in our hand, the second term is negligible, as r will be huge. So A / 2pi = A/6 ~ 1 *106 m2 , square root to get the radius, R = 1 * 103 m = 1 km So if the bat is a meter long, it would have to be around a kilometer in radius to fit everyone’s signatures."
Image credits: HeartlessMario
#23 How Fast Could The London Eye Spin Like A Fan Before It Breaks?
"Each pod is capable of holding 25 people at maximum safe capacity. Assuming each person can reasonably be 100kg, that means the safe load placed on any one pod is 2500kg. The pods themselves weigh 10,000kg. The radius of the London eye is 67.5m. Since at the bottom apex of the rotation the total force from centrifugal/centripetal force is equivalent to weight, a centrifugal force equal to 2500x9.81=24,525N is the maximum safe level. F=MV2/R V=sqrt(FR/M) V=sqrt(24525x67.5/10,000) V=12.9m/s The pods could travel at approximately 28mph, or complete one rotation every 33 seconds, before the forces on the pods exceed safe levels. Theoretical maximum levels would be higher, but without stress testing the material cannot be precisely calculated."
Image credits: TheOnion
#24 Did They Get Her Height Right?
"Counter tops are usually 34 to 36in. It was 5 phones to the top of counter 5.75"*5=28.75" So I think they are off by a factor of 1.18 (34/28.75) That would put her height around 5ft1in."
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Image credits: Sagarbudhwani_
