Published by JPLand on 17 Nov 2008 at 01:25 pm
Nerds
Think the people in your office are nerds? Think again. Our company had some people participate in a “plane pull” this past weekend. (About 20 people grab a rope and pull a 737 about 12 feet as quick as they can. The fastest team wins.) The event was a fundraiser for the Ronald McDonald house, so the whole company was involved in different efforts to try to put some money in .
Our office’s organizer sent out an e-mail this morning to report the results and thank everyone for their help in raising money. Here’s the first response to hit the inbox:
Pulling something 12 ft in 9.1 sec from a dead stop means the average acceleration was 0.29 ft/sec^2. The newspaper said the 727 weighed 175,000 lb, so mass and acceleration gives 1,580 lb force to accelerate it. But the guys also would have had to overcome rolling resistance of the tires. That’s roughly 0.5% of the load they carry, and 0.5% of 175,000 lb is 875 lb. So the total force exerted must have been about 2,450 lb, or about 200 lb each.
2,450 lb over 12 ft is 40 kilojoules of energy expended in 9.1 secs, and that works out to about 4,400 watts of power, enough to power about 3 hair dryers!
Not bad enough, you say? How about the fact that since then, there have been at least 10 more e-mails discussing the initial assumptions and other factors such as ergonomics and the effects it has on force applied.
Some days I leave work just happy to be going home. Today I leave work happy that I’m not that bad.
Pappy Fuller on 17 Nov 2008 at 8:35 pm #
NOW! I want to see this group of esteemed ner…sorry, engineers, hook up 3 hair dryers that will pull the 737 12 feet in 9.1 seconds. I bet ya lunch at Moe’s for 5 that you can’t do it.
Pappy
DruU on 18 Nov 2008 at 8:31 am #
Ohhh… I want to meet these people. I like Nerds, I was never allowed into that group since I was never smart enough. The Dorks liked having me around but the Nerds, now those were the people I kept trying to impress. I wonder if I know enough yet to pretend to be a Nerd.
JPLand on 18 Nov 2008 at 10:23 am #
Pappy,
I don’t think that the intent was that the hair dryers would blow the plane. Perhaps his analysis is better understood if we were to pretend that the rope was tied to a power-generating device and each person pulled 200 lb for 9 seconds. The resulting output would be sufficient for hair-drying. Reversing the process would, of course, be highly inefficient because you would have to capture the heat and fan movement into energy again. So, since I’ve thrown some big words at your challenge, can I get queso dip with my burrito?
DruU,
Nerdiness is not defined by how much knowledge you have. It’s defined by your ability to take real-life scenarios and apply them to something useless. Example: Pulling a rope = hair dryer use. See, all you have to do is work on your ability to equate useless things to real life and you’re in!
DruU on 18 Nov 2008 at 10:32 am #
So, by your definition, I would never be a Nerd not because of my lack of intelligence, but because I refuse to live in the real world.