A Problem Squared

012 = Series of Teeth and Queries of Cheese

10.31.2020 - By Matt Parker & Bec HillPlay

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To celebrate 12 episodes we're collecting some data! If you can, fill in the listener survey: http://thatsurvey.ilikeit.aproblemsquared.com Does this cheese look like it has 41% less packaging? https://www.dropbox.com/s/kuj16lmkgrx8w7i/41cheese.jpeg?dl=0 Here's the wikipedia page we used to make sense of shark teeth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shark_tooth#/media/File:How_to_count_shark_teeth.png The Weaire-Phelan structure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weaire%E2%80%93Phelan_structure What a truncated octahedron looks like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truncated_octahedron And a spinning one!  https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/Truncatedoctahedron.gif MATT'S CALCULATIONS A 140mm × 60mm × 46mm block of cheese has a volume of 386.4 cm^3 and a surface area of 352 cm^2. To give a 41% reduction the original needs to have the same volume of cheese but an area of 596.6 cm^2. Matt assumed there are 4,200,000 current infections and each person has 400,000 virus particles per mL across 2L of fluid. If the SARS-CoV-2 particle has a diameter of 150nm and stacks like spheres with 74% efficiency: those 3,360,000,000,000,000 current virus particles would fill only 8mL, aka "about a teaspoon".

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