Strange Word Problem Two

How about this? The plane only travels 12500 miles. The plane lifts off and slowly moves south at constant speed of just over 6 miles per hour, letting the earth spin beneath it 83 times before it touches down at the south pole!

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ls99 said:
Um, what altitude is the plane flying at?
... The greater the altiude the longer the distance, just sayin':)
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Yes, but considering the other approximations, the plane's altitude is a very minor consideration to the problem.

The diameter of the Earth is ~ 8,000 miles, a plane can fly (as I recall from a Byrd's song), eight miles high, so the diameter of its flight path would be 8016 miles. Circumference is Pi * Dia. So...

(3.14⋅8016)/(3.14⋅8000) = 1.002 (or you could factor out Pi first)

So only about 0.2% increase.

I recall this from the quiz about a rope that circles the Earth on the ground, and how much longer would it need to be if it way to be raised by 3 feet all around the entire Earth? It seems that would take so much extra rope, but it is less than 20 feet ( = 3.14 ⋅ 6 = 18.84).

-ERD50
 
And the answer is...

1,297,675.2 miles​
 

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Why sweat it? If it's Science Fiction any number conjured out of thin air will do...
 
bld999 said:
Why sweat it? If it's Science Fiction any number conjured out of thin air will do...
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I think you underestimate the nerds out there. :)
 
I see that the number of iterations WAS 42!!!! Who woulda thunk it? KingB and Hitchhiker had it right!

Now, as any high schooler knows, round it to fudge the number. :cool:

1+ 1 = 3 for sufficiently large numbers of one.
 
Maybe semi-interesting, but a very rough approximation comes pretty close (though, w/o the more detailed calc, I couldn't know that w/o some more advanced math to identify the trend and find the real average ):

Code: 
Trips					
 0 – 21	 use the half-way point, 67.5 degrees	 9,557.0   21	200,697.0
 22 – 42 use the half-way point, 22.5 degrees	23,017.0   21	483,357.0
					                        684,054.0
					                      1,368,108.0
					
					                      1,297,675.2
		             Delta from T-Al's calc              5.43%

Edit/add: I see Devans0 gave an approach for estimating this in post #23.

Also, T-Al's I think misses something, he doubles 42 trips which would be 84 trips, not 83 (not sure how Devans0 came up with 82.86, but with that precision it must be right! ;) ). So is that an extra equatorial trip? And the 12,500 miles from pole to pole is not insignificant (though that omission would somewhat offset the other added trip). It might make better sense to use the average degrees of the trip - 1.1 degrees and 3.24 for the first two entries?



-ERD50
 
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Right. Close enough. Thanks for the confirmation.
 
If anyone wants to see the final result (actually the first draft result) of this, you can view it here: http://pages.suddenlink.net/tripsite/SphereScenes.pdf

Feel free to give me any feedback. I'm early in the process of writing this book, and if I get comments at this stage, it might save me some work later. For the last part, that involved a naked Barbara Walters, I need to know if my wacky sense of humor is too much.

There are some f words in there.

Thanks,
 
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Random editorial comments:

cover page (no number) -- As you don't indicate the time period in which this story is taking place (until the reference to Barbara Walter's age on page 5), using a phonograph as an example sounds like this story involves a group of Boomers or older. I'm not sure who your target audience is, but some people might find the phonograph reference a bit passe.

near the top of page 2:
"Seth pointed to Bogart Wake, and dropped the hammer on his finger pistol." -- Q: What does this sentence mean? And did you intend to say "pistol finger"?

near the top of page 5:
"Stephanie and I and the six patrons in the club sat close to the TV, and pretty much held our breaths." Perhaps consider using " ..and held our collective breath."

No comment/feedback on Barbara Walters.

omni
 
With even a hint of "a naked Barbara Walters", I'm out. Geez, I just got done eating, how 'bout a warning! :nonono:


-ERD50
 
omni550 said:
Random editorial comments:

cover page (no number) -- As you don't indicate the time period in which this story is taking place (until the reference to Barbara Walter's age on page 5), using a phonograph as an example sounds like this story involves a group of Boomers or older. I'm not sure who your target audience is, but some people might find the phonograph reference a bit passe.

near the top of page 2:
"Seth pointed to Bogart Wake, and dropped the hammer on his finger pistol." -- Q: What does this sentence mean? And did you intend to say "pistol finger"?

near the top of page 5:
"Stephanie and I and the six patrons in the club sat close to the TV, and pretty much held our breaths." Perhaps consider using " ..and held our collective breath."

No comment/feedback on Barbara Walters.

omni
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Thanks, Omni.

Yes, I guess I'll have to refer to a CD instead of a record.

OK, I'll fix or remove the finger pistol thing. It was supposed to be a geeky way of Seth tell the other guy to take the question, like miming shooting him with a pistol.
 
I think the timeframe needs to be established early on. A CD might be outdated more than a DVD. A new 60 flatscreen sounds so 2006 to me. How about just having the image appear on their usual display. The pistol episode could be just "he simulated firing a pistol with his hand". How about Barbara Walters at 40 if she must be naked? Sure she was not on The View then but who cares?
 
Good comments, but I'd like to find out whether the Barbara Walters thing is too weird and too wacky. And am I generally on the right track for a fiction book?
 
scrinch said:
How about this? The plane only travels 12500 miles. The plane lifts off and slowly moves south at constant speed of just over 6 miles per hour, letting the earth spin beneath it 83 times before it touches down at the south pole!
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This would work, but must be done at a very high altitude outside of the atmosphere!

If the craft does not spin with the earth, it will have to fight an increasingly strong crosswind as it comes down from the pole. The earth circumference is roughly 25,000 miles, and as it spins 1 round/24 hr, that's 1,000 mi/hr wind at the equator if one does not want to go along with the earth's spin.

PS. One would need an anti-gravity machine to be able to hover or move very slowly (in inertial space) at high altitudes. Outside of the atmosphere, an air machine like helicopters does not work, and something like a satellite or a shuttle has to move very fast in order to stay at orbital altitudes.
 
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Well, as long as we're getting technical, I guess we'd have to count the miles traveled through space as the earth completed almost 1/4 of its circuit around the sun also.

Sent from my ADR6350 using Tapatalk 2
 
Then, the problem is that we do not really have a reference frame to even talk about "absolute velocity" as such thing does not exist.

The sun and our own galaxy are also moving with respect to other galaxies. We have no absolute origin to measure from.
 
Yes Al, I think you are on the right track. Because it is a work of fiction, you have license to change the details to make the piece entertaining.
 
scrinch said:
Well, as long as we're getting technical, I guess we'd have to count the miles traveled through space as the earth completed almost 1/4 of its circuit around the sun also.
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Yesterday I rode my bike at 67,000 miles per hour.
 
TromboneAl said:
Yesterday I rode my bike at 67,000 miles per hour.
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That's just the orbital speed of the earth around the sun. But the sun is moving at 490,000 miles/hr inside our galaxy, relative to other stars.
 
According to Neil Tyson, this is how we get to pick up space debris from The Milky Way.
 
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