Awesome

June 19, 2005

« back to home page

I haven't been feeling well lately, so my sleep hours are rather odd, even for me. I was up at around 5am this morning, and I was listening to the audio from Eddie Izzard's Circle DVD, and I got to the Awesome Universe bit - the joke is basically that the word "awesome" doesn't mean the same as it used to; we (Americans) use the word "awesome" to describe things like hot dogs and socks. So when someone tries to explain to the president that we live in a galaxy with a hundred billion stars and that it's an awesome sight, the president says, "What, awesome like a hot dog?" ("Like a hundred billion hot dogs, sir.")

That connection between "100 billion" and "hot dogs" got stuck in my mind, so I set out to calculate how big 100 billion hot dogs would be. I based my calculations on the plain old Oscar Mayer Regular Beef Frank, 1/8 lb, 6 3/8" x 1".

100 billion hot dogs is:

And that, my friends, is awesome.

Comments

Posted by Chris the Tiki Guy :: :: :: Jun 19, 2005 11:41pm
Now that is truly the dog's bollocks.
Link to this comment :: ^Back to top
Posted by redraven :: :: :: Jun 20, 2005 12:11pm
As are you Ryland. Thanks - we got quite a laugh out of this one!
Link to this comment :: ^Back to top
Posted by the Merkin :: :: :: Jun 20, 2005 12:36pm
You truly have too much time on your hands Ryland!
Link to this comment :: ^Back to top
Posted by Robert Waugh :: :: :: Jun 20, 2005 02:18pm
I wonder how much heat it would take to cook all them dogs. If you could figure that out, now that would be awesome.
Link to this comment :: ^Back to top
Posted by robster :: :: :: Jun 23, 2005 08:46am
you'd need to cook them really slowly, at a low temperature. i mean if they were in a block like that. you know.
Link to this comment :: ^Back to top
Posted by Danny D :: :: :: Jun 24, 2005 02:21am
Now, I simply have to ask: Does this calculation of volume include the empty air space between the inefficiently stacked hot dogs? And would the hot dogs on the bottom be smushed, and therefore take up less surface by the weight of 100 billion hot dogs on the top? I see this as a problem.

-Dan the Man
Link to this comment :: ^Back to top
Posted by Ryland :: :: :: Jun 24, 2005 09:00am
You're right, the cube represents an ideal hot dog cube, that is, it assumes that hot dogs would be perfectly symmetrical and uniform in size, stacked perfectly, and with no settling or squashing. I treated it as a pure math problem, not as a practical one. In the real world, I sincerely doubt it would be possible to stack 100 billion hot dogs in any free-standing configuration, even if they were frozen; hot dogs simply aren't a good building material. I tried to simplify the math, for what was intended to be a popular article and not a technical guide to hot dog structural engineering.
Link to this comment :: ^Back to top
Posted by justinf :: :: :: Jun 24, 2005 08:23am
"laid end-to-end, a line of hot dogs 10,061,553 miles (16,192,500 kilometers) long - enough to circle the earth 404 times (at the equator)."

if the hot dogs were laid out in a circle, with a circumference of 10,061,553 miles, they would orbit the earth as hot-dog ring at an altitude of 1,601,345 miles from the centre of the Earth - or about 1,597,382 miles from the surface.
Link to this comment :: ^Back to top
Posted by Ryland :: :: :: Jun 24, 2005 09:03am
Sweet. I'm adding that to the posting (and giving you credit).
Link to this comment :: ^Back to top
Posted by Solecistic :: :: :: Jun 24, 2005 05:25pm
You have truly become my new hero. Hot dogs are on my list of some of the most disgusting things in the universe, but that my friends is truly awesome. It's also awesome (now IN the hot dog sort of way) that I was watching that same stand up at approximately the same time you were. Indeed. And furthermore I was in the audience the night the DVD taping occured... Life is so strange.
Link to this comment :: ^Back to top
Posted by justinf :: :: :: Jun 24, 2005 09:54pm
according to Wikipedia the average weight of a Blue whale is 140 metric tons. 1 metric ton = 1000 kilograms

100 billion hotdogs is 5.7 billion kilograms , which equates to 5,700,000 metric tons. Dividing that by 140 , and we come up with figure of 40714.

So 100 billion hotdogs is as heavy as 40,714 blue whales.
Link to this comment :: ^Back to top
Posted by justinf :: :: :: Jun 24, 2005 10:03pm
100 billion hotdogs = 5.7 billion kg

The Saturn V rocket weighed 2.8 million kg.

If you divide the hot dogs into the Saturn rocket you end up with:

100 billion hotdogs = 2035 Saturn V rockets.

Thats a LOT of hotdogs.
Link to this comment :: ^Back to top
Posted by JoeC :: :: :: Jun 25, 2005 02:51pm
I think if you made a giant cube of hotdog like that, the pressure at the center would actually start to cause heating and would cook it from the inside. Just a guess.
Link to this comment :: ^Back to top
Posted by jman :: :: :: Jun 25, 2005 06:33pm
Any physicists in the crowd? What would the critical mass of hot dogs be, given the amounts of radioactive material ingested by the average hot dog ingredient in its 4-legged, pre-processing stage of life....surely if we let them decay for a while, there would be enough residiual "hot" material to reach critical mass....oh no! Terror alert condition periwinkle! Hot dogs of mass destruction!

Unfortunately, JoeC, while the pressure would be immense, the heating would only continue while the hot dogs were being piled up and as long as the weenies were compressible (liquids and solids aren't very compressible, so the spacing between their molecules doesn't change much when you pile 'dogs on top of them, hence there's very little change in the energy of the interactions between their molecules, and hence, very little change in the temperature of the largely solid and liquid hot dogs). Still, if the rate at which the hot dogs were being added was sufficiently high, yes, you'd produce enough heat through compression to cause the weenies on the bottom to "warm up" a tiny bit, provided the surface-to-volume ratio of the weenie cube was right. But once the heat was dissipated or distributed through the other 'dogs, it would gradually re-equilibrate with the ambient hot dog temperature, or that of the air around the cube. So yes, some on the bottom would probably get warm, largely due to the compression of small amounts of gas inside the amorphous mixture of materials that hot dogs are made from.

It's been too long since I lectured on thermodynamics to work it out (not long enough, but a while), and I lack the necessary data on the composition and compressibility of the average hot dog, heat capacities, etc. to give you a definitive answer.

I can just see the research being published:

"Non-Adiabatic Compressive Heating of 100 Billion Hot Dogs as Explained by the Joule-Thompson Effect"

I just knew all those classes had to be good for something. Damn I wish I had a life ;)
Link to this comment :: ^Back to top
Posted by mic :: :: :: Jul 11, 2005 06:47pm
Bacteria Decomposers present in the meat would start to break it down, respiring aerobically, using up oxygen (in between layers of 'inefficiently stacked' hot dogs) and giving out heat as one of the products.
Hot dogs near the centre and at the bottom would probably be heated the most as they would also gain heat from adjacent hot dogs.
If there was enough oxygen left, and the heat was sufficient, spontaneous combustion could occur. You would get slightly less than 5.7billion kg of 'toasted dog', alot of smoke, a weird smell combination of rotting meat and barbeque, and a big-ass fire to cook 100billion burgers instead. Awesome!
Link to this comment :: ^Back to top
Posted by eric :: :: :: Jul 11, 2005 07:06pm
Are these 100 billion hotdogs cooked or not cooked because that would affect these stats to a great magnitude
Link to this comment :: ^Back to top
Posted by Fyrewolf :: :: :: Jul 14, 2005 03:32pm
This has got to be the most off the wall thing that I've come across this week...

I don't know what is more frightning, the fact that I understand the science behind this or the fact that I'm at all interested in understanding the science behind this.

I scare myself.
Link to this comment :: ^Back to top
Posted by Lucia :: :: :: Jul 23, 2005 03:06pm
I think they should build the hot dog cube at ground zero, as a tribute to freedom-loving Americans everywhere.

And to snub the pork-fearing terrorists.
Link to this comment :: ^Back to top
Posted by Comrade Yamamoto :: :: :: Jul 23, 2005 09:02pm
Nice idea, but many Jewish ppl live in NYC, and may be offended by such a mound of swine flesh.
Link to this comment :: ^Back to top
Posted by Jenna :: :: :: Jul 24, 2005 12:09am
As far as I know, there is such a thing as Kosher hotdogs, but they're probably beef dogs.
Link to this comment :: ^Back to top