Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Sunday, 27 April 2003

# 10:25 PM

kitchen observations

I was doing the dishes and I noticed that, as I removed dishes from the sink (which had been completely filled with water) the water level was only barely dropping. The dishes had taken up the entire sink — could it really be that their true volume was so small? So I made some measurements. Assuming the sink to be a perfect rectangular prism (it isn't, but measuring the deviations would be too much trouble), its upper surface is 54x44=2376 cm². Removing all the dishes from the sink made the water level drop two centimeters, so that's a volume of 4752 cm³, or 4.75 Liters, or (for those of us who've a better intuitive sense for old-fashioned English units) 1.2 gallons. Which is not so small, really.

For comparison, the total volume of the sink is 54.6 liters (14.4 gallons — roughly the capacity of my car's gas tank) and rinsing all those dishes consumed 33.2 liters of water (8.8 gallons).

small world

Last week, over on bIPlog, there appeared a filk of The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, going by the title Revolution is not an AOL Keyword.

The author: a gentleman by the name of Eddan Katz, a recent graduate of UC Berkeley's law school. Which happens to be the name of someone I went to high school with; in fact, for awhile he was my carpool driver. A bit of Googling strongly suggests that they are the same person — both are Israeli-American and both were Yale class of 1997. And the guy I knew was planning on law school.

It's a good filk, and has garnered a fair bit of comment. Y'all should go read it.