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“Like a worm in the bud…” — Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

Order of Magnitudes

If you stand on a scale with a cup of water and start drinking, the scale will read the same number.

This was a small shower thought I had last night and I started wondering if I could measure something interesting using a scale and a cup of water.

Grams per gulp

I wanted to see how many gulps of water it would take until the reading on the electronic scale changed.

After I took 40 gulps, that’s when my mass went up by 300 grams, or 0.3 kg. Now, there could be some error here, but it wouldn’t change the result too much because of how many gulps I took. If I took a smaller number of gulps and it changed readings quickly, the error would be huge.

Unit definition

The cool thing about metric units for volume and mass is that one liter of water is almost exactly one kg of water under normal conditions.

Also, a squared meter is equal to 1000 liters.

Gulping the oceans

I looked up how much water there is in the ocean, and I got 1.33 billion cubic km. Then, I converted cubic km to cubic deciliter which is the same as liter.

So, I multiplied by $(10^4)^3$ which gave me $1.33 * 10^{21}$ L.

Finally, if you multiply by 40 gulps and divide by 0.3 L, it means that it will take $1.78 * 10^{23}$ gulps to drink the entire ocean.

Do your part!

Dividing by the total population of Earth¹, which is 8 billion, and got that everyone would need to take $2.2 * 10^{11}$ gulps over their lifetime.

Given the average life expectancy, which is around 73 years, or around 2.3 billion seconds, everyone has to take around 100 gulps per second in order to drink the whole ocean in a single human lifetime.

This model does not account for excretions, but let’s just say that eventually, everyone will end up like Friedrich Wöhler.²

Order up!

Mr. J, my old chem teacher, really values these kinds of calculations and was glad to hear during my recent visit that Caltech teaches order-of-magnitude estimates.

He calls them Fermi calculations, based on the way that physicist Enrico Fermi used multiple factors and multiplied them together to make estimations.

I used to think that this was the only example of a Fermi estimate, but the most famous example is the Drake equation, which can be used to estimate the number of intelligent alien civilizations in the universe.³ This is one of the ways to guess at the solution to the Fermi paradox.

tan(Fermi)

It’s funny just how much talent was shifted away from Europe just because of the oppression faced by people of various ethnicities during the WW2 era.

Fermi and Einstein are good examples, but I wonder if the same is happening today or will happen in the future.

Scoring

This sort of dimensional analysis can help with creating scoring methods for various algorithms. For example, deciding when to divide or multiply by a value.

Missed Connections

I originally planned to meet up with R, E, and A over break but it just didn’t end up happening for various reasons.

However, at least I was able to hang out with J again before I left. I had never been to Hudson Yards before for some reason but it was pretty cool. We went south on the High Line from Penn Station and ate some tacos in Chelsea Market.

We tried Van Leeuwen Ice Cream and it was pretty solid, but maybe a bit too sweet for me.

The one I tried to draw

Drawing faces is so hard. Proportions, symmetry, and depth are all important.

For me, it’s hardest to get the correct depth on a tablet using only pencil to sketch. I think the hardest perspective for drawing faces is the front view because it’s harder to create depth.

If you had a box, you could draw from any angle and create some idea of depth, but from the front it’s just a square.

For the face, I think shading must be used but I don’t know how to do the shading so that’s the main issue.

Imitations

After learning to draw figures, I began to view people’s bodies differently. When I see someone, I try to observe their posture and think of how I would draw them.

One of the main things I noticed is that the legs are not actually under the torso, they are to the side of the pelvis and form the hips which go outward from the waist.

Also, the ribs are actually very close to the hips. I kept drawing the hips way below the ribs for some reason, and the torso ended up very long.

New Students

I just found out that Caltech only admitted 315/13000 students this year, which is 2.4% of the applicants. I think they calculated the yield properly this time and there will be around 230 students (‘27 has 263).

Pooling

Most students are involved in at least one club or activity, but that’s still not enough to save many clubs from extinction.

For example, the school newspaper seems to be running on a very low labor force.

Also, every acapella group has gone extinct except for Out of Context, the group that I’m currently in.

Three wolves and one sheep

Most house votes that disadvantage underclassmen always pass because sophomores know that changes will occur the next year when they are upperclassmen. So, it’s really just freshmen vs the rest of the school.

Potential solution

In votes that discriminate between under and upperclassmen, seniors cannot vote and each frosh vote should count as two votes.

Seniors should not be able to vote on things that will not affect them and frosh are outnumbered 1:2 against sophomores and juniors.

It’s unfortunate that the framers of house constitutions did not consider this.

DTLA

Downtown LA was a lot of fun but it felt unsafe at times when we walked from Grand Central Market (a food court) to the famous Los Angeles Cathedral; the main factor was empty streets, probably because LA is a car city.

However, it was quite convenient to call an Uber to get everyone there. The total cost at the end was less than $11 per person for the cars.

The Broad

There were a lot of cool art pieces in The Broad, a contemporary art museum which is smaller than the MoMA and Met in NYC but still has many cool pieces.

I really enjoyed a piece where there was a red trapezoid next to a blue trapezoid and it looked like two walls of a room in 3D even though it was flat.

That shape is both the logo for BTS the Los Angeles Cathedral. I’m not sure what this would imply though.

Footnotes

1. Not including extraterrestrial populations, sorry ↩

2. Callback to “You Are My Special” ↩

3. Not related to notable Canadian, Aubrey Drake Graham ↩