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Pastimes : Clown-Free Zone... sorry, no clowns allowed -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: patron_anejo_por_favor who wrote (287249)	5/14/2004 4:19:34 PM
From: Lucretius	Respond to of 436258

lol.....

To: patron_anejo_por_favor who wrote (287249)	5/14/2004 5:13:02 PM
From: stan_hughes	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 436258

Hey patron - You've been watching Jeopardy! I checked into that gold question because I thought it was a bit fishy. Here's my back of the napkin math: The dimensions of a 400 troy ounce gold bar are 200mm long by 80mm wide by 45mm high, or 8.333" long by 3.333" wide by 1.875" high. Check it out - taxfreegold.co.uk A 50' cube has 600" sides (I'm afraid you'll have to trust me on that part). Let's build one. The side of the cube would consist of 600/8.333 = 72 gold bars per horizontal course, stacked on top of each other in 600/1.875 = 320 rows high. Therefore, there are 72x320 = 23,040 gold bars per stacked row. A full 3D cube would be 600/3.333 = 180 deep of these foregoing stacked rows, for a total of 23,040x180 = 4,147,200 gold bars in total for a 50' cube. One 400 troy ounce bar expressed in tonnes is 0.01244114 tonnes. onlineconversion.com Therefore, 4,147,200 gold bars would weigh 51,596 tonnes. According to gold.org all of the gold mined in the past 6,000 years weighs 125,000 tonnes, with 90% of that or 112,500 tonnes mined since 1848. That suggests Jeopardy is mistaken, because only about half of the gold ever mined would fit into a 50' cube. Even so, it's still a fairly impressive illustration of how compact the yeller feller truly is. Maybe Jeopardy has a different source for the historical amount of gold mined, but it's hard to imagine the number being 50% different -- I think they blew it on this one, and I want them to send me a large cheque for my trouble....