The end of Facebook (for me)
For those of you who have followed my blog before, I'd like to inform you of a few changes. First of all, as of Sunday Aug 9, 2015, I no longer have a facebook. I felt it was time to get away from facebook, they have become a company that doesn't respect the privacy or freedom of their users. Not to mention that facebook has gone from being a place to reconnect with old friends, to a place to think your making a political statement by reposing a news article with no actual references or data to back up its claims. Which is about as effective as, well, shouting at a wall. That is literally what your doing too, why do you think they call it a facebook wall.
So I've permanently deactivated my facebook account. "But", you ask, "Why didn't you just delete it? If you don't like it so much why even keep it around?" Well, my answer to that is two fold. First, that even when you delete your facebook, they keep the data anyway (for a "reasonable" amount of time), it says so in that big long "terms of use" that they make everyone sign, I think a court order could get them to remove it, but I would be willing to even go to that much trouble to get them too. My second reason is that to me, my facebook represents a social journal that my posterity may access some day and learn about that time in my life. I'm not accustomed to burning books, and I feel like deleting my facebook would be burning a book.
Some Changes
Moving on, now that I haven't got a facebook, I plan to make regular posts here about my life. This is a change from the content that I have traditionally posted here, but I believe it to be a positive change. One of many positive changes I'm trying to make with my life right now. I've recently realized that for a while now, I've not been the person I wanted to be, and I'm changing a lot of things in my life to move forward and become the person I do want to be.
Part of this instigation of change was brought about by a recent situation in my life in which I nearly lost a dear friend. Not to death or to some other cause that was beyond my control, but because of who I had become. Not speaking to this person for a week helped me to realize what I had become and what I needed to do to improve myself. I also learned some valuable things about managing anxiety, being successful, and psychology. I've sense reopened communication with this friend and we are working towards rebuilding and strengthening our relationship. But I'm thankful for the time away and what it has taught me.
A Urinalysis
Now on to something... Interesting, and probably a little gross. To preface this little story, let me first say that this has nothing to do with a drug test, or anything like that. Its mostly math.
My parents and I were walking around a lake in a little town called Mantua and for some reason the conversation came up that you can tell if someone lies if they tell you they have never peed in the shower. This then moved to peeing in pools. I explained to my dad that that's why there are showers at the pools and chlorine in the water. That water is gross and the only reason it's considered sanitary is because there's so much chlorine in there. Otherwise, you would probably be cleaner in a river downstream from a dairy farm. Its not just that people pee in the pool, we shed skin in the pool, we spit in the pool, we sweat in the pool. Its not clean, it just looks that way.
This led me to pose a question, how many people would it take to pee in a pool and fill it with urine? So my dad and I, much to my mothers dismay, began to discuss the numbers. According to my dad who has worked with people as a paramedic for many years, the average human bladder can hold about 250 ml of liquid. That's about half of a bottled water. Since we didn't have a pool to get accurate measurements, we estimated a pool sized at about 20 meters across 40 meters long, and 2 meters deep (we used metric numbers to ease our calculations in our heads) I've since looked up the numbers for an Olympic sized swimming pool. It has a length of 50 meters, width of 25 meters, and a minimum depth of 2 meters. Its recommended depth is 3 meters though, so we will use 3 meters.
The first thing we need to do is find out the volume of the pool, 50m*25m*3m = 3750m cubed.
Now in order to convert that into liters, we have to multiply it by 1000, so the pool holds 3750000 liters, or 3.75 Mega-liters of liquid.
Finally, we divide the pool by an average bladder, 3.75 Ml divided by 250ml, the easiest way to do this is just to divide by 4 because 250ml is 1/4 of 1 liter. That gives us 937500 people.
So it would take 937,500 people to fill an Olympic sized pool with urine. That is of course not taking into account the rate of evaporation, or the time it takes for them to do the deed. (This by the way was as far as my dad and I got)
If we gave everyone 1 meter of space to relieve themselves, that would mean we could have 150 people using it at a time. If we give them a full minute to get it all out, that gives us our time, 937500/150 minutes. Which is 375000 minutes or 261 days. That's kind of a long time to "hold it" for.
Next we need an evaporation rate, in order for us to find that we need to know whats in urine in the first place, because different things evaporate at different rates, and some things don't evaporate at all. Fortunately, it seems most of urine is water, so to make things simpler, we will go with the evaporation rate of water. Unfortunately this still gets complicated as evaporation rates take into consideration a lot of unknown variables in our hypothetical situation. After some looking I was able to find several sources of information on this, here, here, and here. At this point if we want an accurate calculation of how long and how many people it would really take to fill that pool with warm lemonade, we probably would want to run a computer simulation. Because evaporation changes over time and based on a lot of factors, so for the sake of finishing this I'm going to use a vary lazy calculation.
After looking at the average evaporation from peoples pools, and seeing that its around 1 inch per week. I'm going to use that as my bases. First we need to convert it to metric. That gives us 0.0254 meters per week, 3.6 mm per day, 0.15 mm per hour that combined with the width and length of the pool gives us 0.1875 cubed meters per hour, or 187.5 l/h
Now we said that we could put 150 people around the pool at a time and give them 1 minute to do the deed. If each of them has 250ml of pee that 37.5 liters a minute, or 2250 l/h so now we have an inflow rate and an outflow (or evaporation rate) which will give us a fill rate.
2250 l - 187.5 l = 2062.5 l/h Here is out fill rate
3.75 Ml / 2062.5 l = 1818 hours is our fill time or 75 days (this is how much extra time it will take)
Total time is 261+75 = 336 days
Total people 336 * 24 * 60 *150 = 72,576,000 People
So in summery, in order to fill an Olympic sized swimming pool with Bear Grylls favorite drink, you would need to organize over 72 million people to come pee in an Olympic pool over the course of almost a year.
Now that, is an analysis of urine! Have fun at the pool everyone!!