Just how rich was Scrooge McDuck?

Turns out Scrooge McDuck isn’t just the world’s richest bird. His money piles have been mathematically examined by thebillfold.com to show that he’s about three times richer than the world’s richest man.

When the area under the curve is calculated (from x=-3 to x=5), it yields roughly 46 square inches. The assumption will be made here that one cubic inch is roughly one ounce of gold. To convert that into a dome shape the value is simply cubed, which becomes 97,366 ounces. Given that 1 ounce of gold is roughly $5.00, it can extrapolated that each large pile of gold in the vault is worth $486,830.

However, Scrooge McDuck was first drawn in 1947, therefore inflation must be adjusted for which totals a whopping 5.2 billion dollars per pile. In the picture, there are two smaller piles which roughly equal the larger doubling the total to 10.4 billion. However, the shadows in the corner suggest that the room is a least three times as large as it is. Therefore, Scrooge was privy to a cool 31.2 billion dollars…

Calculating his velocity (roughly 5 m/s2) suggests that this mountain (of which we cannot see the summit) has a slope of 35 degrees, putting a rough estimate of the entire hill at 73.5 billion. Is it possible that McDuck pushed together his wealth to make this monstrosity? In theory, yes, but the eye line of McDuck (fixed at 8 degrees above the horizon relative to the slope) suggests that there are at least two other such mounds, putting his total wealth at over 210 billion, and well beyond the meager 70 billion of richest man in the world Carlos Slim Helu.

Via the Twitters.

April 29, 2012

Big day for my biggest little sister

I’m looking forward to watching my biggest little sister get married tomorrow.

I’m thankful that I’m the oldest child in my family because I can watch all my sisters blossom, and appreciate their gifts, with pride rather than envy.

It’s a privilege to have grown up with such quality women, who became something of a yardstick for me when it came to looking for my own spouse.

Anyway. Big congrats to Jo, and to Shayne. I think the comment a status I posted asking for one word descriptions of both of them pretty much sums this up:

“Jo is incredible in every way. Shayne is a very lucky guy”

I’ll be MCing the wedding. I’ve done a few of these now. I’m finding it harder and harder to try to be funny rather than functional. I’ve seen so many bad MCs and I dread being one of them.

April 27, 2012

Review: The Avengers

There are very few movies that lure me into the cinema these days. But I braved the crowds to see The Avengers on Anzac Day, such was my excitement. And I wasn’t disappointed. The action was punchy. Joss Whedon kept all the big name players in focus, and injected a little touch of human pizzazz on top of the bright, sparkly, CGI stuff.

It’s not going to win any awards. But from me it gets 4 Stars. A ninja or two, and an alien robot, would have bumped this up to 4.5.

April 27, 2012

Shortening the odds

Ahh Bill. Once upon a time I thought you were cut from the cloth of media and political greatness. Sadly. The party machine kills any individuality. And now you’re a meme.

Why can’t our pollies do classy things like this…

April 27, 2012

Very useful “how to” videos

I watched these and I laughed till I cried and my chest hurt and I couldn’t breathe properly. I was up until 3am this morning though.

April 26, 2012

Why old books smell delicious

I love libraries and second hand bookshops. Especially old ones with creaky shelves. I love the smell of old books, and am delighted to have a new vocabulary to describe their smell thanks to this nice little video.

Via everywhere else, starting with Neatorama.

April 24, 2012

Comical disappointment: how the ads from old comics stack up to reality

Comic book ads always promised so much. But given my collection (other than my Phantom comics) came from second hand shops, I was never really in a position to partake of the goodness they offered.

Allegedly the ads didn’t really deliver on the promise. So says Kirk Demarais who has made tracking down the products sold in the back pages of his favourite comic books his life’s work. That’s a link to a thoroughly interesting link where you’ll learn more than you ever thought necessary about the products sold in the back of a comic.

He exposes the secret of X-ray specs below (Spoiler alert)…

“The lens is made up of two pieces of thin cardboard, more like cardstock, with a hole in the center, and in between those cardboard pieces is an actual feather. It’s hard to explain how it works. I have the book here. Let me read. I said, “In the original Spex, the X-ray illusion occurs as the viewer looks through genuine feathers which are embedded between the cardboard. … The feathers’ veins diffract light, creating the appearance of two offset images. A darker area forms where the images overlap which can be interpreted as bone in your hand or the curves of a lady.”

April 23, 2012

Sharpening Pencils for the advanced

This looks like a sensational and world shaking book – How to Sharpen Pencils: A Practical and Theoretical Treatise on the Artisanal Craft of Pencil Sharpening for Writers, Artists, Contractors, Flange Turners, Anglesmiths, & Civil Servant.

Its author, David Rees, is involved in a fascinating interview here (with the obligatory language warning), about the book, and its titular issue – the correct sharpening of pencils. He’s a pencil sharpening consultant – charging $15 per pencil.

“David Rees: Well, the whole point of the book was to try to defamiliarize pencil-sharpening as an activity, so that people would just approach it from square one again. One of the things I liked about starting the artisanal pencil sharpening business was that it made me think about pencils in greater depth than I probably ever had in my life. And the more I thought about them the more I appreciated them as really efficient, elegant tools. But sharpening pencils is always a little intimidating, especially with the single-blade pocket sharpener, where you might break the tip or you might not be satisfied with how it turns out. Frankly I think the book is meant to make sharpening pencils simultaneously less and more intimidating.”

TM: I think you did about the right amount of thinking. But the knowledge you’re laying down here is incredibly detailed and thorough. You think you might be in danger of putting yourself out of business?
DR: It’s not a worry. In fact, it’s the goal. I don’t want to do this forever. I wanted to just throw open the doors of my workshop and just share my secrets. Whenever an article gets written about my pencil sharpening business, there’s always someone who’s like “Fifteen dollars? I’ll do it for ten!” And I’m always like: “You know what? It’s a free market economy, knock yourself out. Let’s see what you got.” It’s enough for me to know that I’m first in field, as they say. I invented this industry, and I’m happy to share what I’ve learned, and hopefully empower people to sharpen their own pencils.

April 22, 2012

Get that new Apple smell

I was once really fascinated by scent branding/marketing. I think it’s a relatively untapped goldmine. I say relatively untapped because things are starting to happen – like this. An art exhibition from an Australian group called Greatest Hits is pumping out a specially designed “New Mac” fragrance.

“A distinctive scent can be observed when unwrapping a newly purchased Apple product from its packaging. Apple fans will certainly recognize this smell. The scent created for Greatest Hits encompasses the smell of the plastic wrap covering the box, printed ink on the cardboard, the smell of paper and plastic components within the box and of course the aluminum laptop which has come straight from the factory where it was assembled in China…

Air Aroma fragrance designers then used these samples as ingredients to create a range of signature blend fragrances. The blends, each with unique recipes were then tested in the Air Aroma laboratory until a final fragrance was ultimately selected.

To replicate the smell a brand new unopened Apple was sent to our fragrance lab in France. From there, professional perfume makers used the scents they observed unboxing the new Apple computer to source fragrance samples. On completion the laptop was sent back to Australia, travelling nearly 50,000kms and returned to our clients together with scent of an Apple Macbook Pro.”

April 22, 2012

$90 burger features 1,050 slices of bacon

Burger King Japan ran a promo where you could add an already obscene number of bacon slices (more than six – which is the yardstick of bacon obscenity) for just 100 Japanese yen. So some guy thought it’d be fun to see what about $90 would buy him.


Image Credit: Japanator.com

From Japanator.

April 22, 2012

Frogger in real traffic

This is sensational. Some smartheads have linked real time traffic data from a real street with the arcade classic Frogger.

5th Ave Frogger from Tyler DeAngelo on Vimeo.

Via

April 22, 2012

A nuts argument: I’m no scientist but this doesn’t sound right…

If you’re going to argue against evolution you probably need a more compelling argument than this.

April 20, 2012

Jetman: Flying, or falling with style

This is awesome. But there is no way you’d catch me doing this.

April 20, 2012

What slow motion cameras were invented for…

While slow motion stuff is great in sports coverage, it is absolutely phenomenal for capturing moments of human stupidity.

Via Kottke.

April 19, 2012

My six rules for posting parenting related stuff on Facebook

So a while back I courted controversy by poking fun at parents who overshared on Facebook. Now, the world has turned and revolved. Time has passed. And I’m a parent. Which is great. Really it’s up there as one of the equal best things that has ever happened to me.

Like all parents I believe my offspring to be the cutest and most interesting baby the world has ever known. Like most modern day parents I believe Facebook is a great medium for sharing content with interested people who live a long way away. Like my sister who lives interstate, and my sister-in-law, brother-outlaw, and nephew who live overseas. It’s so easy to justify posting stuff on this basis. But that. Friends. Is a slippery slope into oversharing – about which my thoughts have not changed. But consider this a preemptive post which I will supply in the future to anybody who calls me out on the potentially perceived gap between my words in 2009, and my actions in 2012.

So here are my six rules.

1. Make it opt-in. Don’t force people to consume what you’re putting out there. The internet pretty much does this for you though, so I don’t worry too much about that.
2. Make it interesting. People won’t hate you for oversharing if they’re entertained, or what you are posting is actually cute. Check with someone else. Edit. Put up less than you think you ought (I’m a little guilty of breaking this last bit). Leave people wanting more.
3. Keep it contained. Don’t post a new album of photos every time you upload a photo. Post photos to the old albums. Don’t clutter people’s newsfeeds with an upload a day, upload a batch at once.
4. Don’t be single-minded. There’s more to life than your child and than your role as a parent. Talk about that stuff too. For me this means posting about coffee. Posting links to cool stuff. Posting
links to my blog(s).
5. Don’t potentially embarrass the child. Remember your child isn’t old enough to censor you yet. So self censor. I have good poo stories, and good spew stories. But only posted about the latter when it was me who got covered, and mostly because Robyn’s response to said covering was to laugh and get the camera, rather than to clean me up.
6. Never. Ever. Give gratuitous parenting advice to anybody on the basis of how excellent your own child is, or how brilliant you think you are at parenting. Especially if you’re not a parent.

So, that’s really a long justification for sharing these additional photos of our incredibly cute daughter. Dressed in a koala suit that I bought online. When I ordered it a couple of months ago I was told that it was tacky and horrible. Now I think it’s safe to say that the purchase was inspired.

April 18, 2012