Thunks

Oh, the things one finds when procrastinating on Facebook… I found a weekly meme called Thursday Thunks.

Thursday Thunks (TT) is a blog meme for those who need a little kick in the butt to find something to post about. Your blog posts/answers to TT's can be type or pictures, doesn't matter! YOU pick, not us, we just give you the assignment (yep, just like English class... only we won't grade your spelling & grammer).

“Golf balls, Alphabet, Maggots, Butt Paste & Much More Madness”
1. How many golf balls can fit inside a full sized school bus?
The answer is 42.
.
.
.
This cannot be answered mathematically with only the information given. Assume: the school bus is an empty shell with closed windows and doors; height and width of 8 feet, length 42 feet. Then the volume will be 2688 cubic feet, or 4.6448x10^6 cubic inches. A regulation golf ball has a minimum diameter of 1.68 inches, so the volume is 2.4827 cubic inches.
Without knowledge of spherical packing or the use of Google, you can estimate the number of golf balls that will fit by determining a high estimate and a low estimate. A high estimate would use the actual volume of the sphere assuming no air space left in the bus; a low estimate would be to square off the golf ball to a cube with edge length equal to the sphere’s diameter. The true value lies between the two.
Anyone who has studied solid state chemistry knows about spherical packing and can use the packing density to give a good answer. Cubic or hexagonal close packing has a density of pi divided by the square root of 18, ~0.74048. Irregular close packing is lower, having a density of ~0.64. Assuming the entire volume can be filled with golf balls, the answer is 1,870,866. If an ordered close packing is employed then there would be 1,385,339 golf balls. And for random close packing, the most likely arrangement to obtain if you tried to do this experimentally, there would be 1,197,354 golfballs.
Over a million golf balls!

2. Who decided the alphabet order?
I would guess that it dates back to the Greeks of the 6th and 5th Centuries BCE.

3. Why doesn't McDonald's sell hotdogs?
They don’t want to sink even lower on the nutritional value scale.

4. You go to a nice restaurant and they are offering free samples of cheese. You take a bite and it's delicious. Then they tell you the cheese is processed with maggots in it which make the great texture and flavor. Do you vomit at the thought of maggots, think "oh well but no more", or just ask for another sample?
I generally ask about the food before I sample it and would not sample a maggot-containing cheese. However, in the case of this story, I would likely go with the middle of the road response of thinking “oh well but no more.”

5. Would you rather ride on a cloud or slide down a rainbow?
I would rather ride on a cloud because it would allow me to travel and see Earth from above, kind of like an astronaut. Sliding down a rainbow sounds more like an amusement park ride—giant water slide or rollercoaster—and I’ve never been a big fan of those.

6. Do you know/care who Heidi & Spencer are?
I don’t know and don’t care.

7. Have you ever used Butt Paste?
I have used it when diapering a baby. But personally, no.

8. Pie or cake?
I love π!

9. Do you remember when MTV used to play music videos?
I’ve heard that time existed, but we weren’t allowed to watch it. Not that we had cable anyway.