@31east
Praxis
Posts
20865
Last update
2019-09-08 18:42:46

    Survival Arithmetic

    I once heard an old Egyptian tale about a man who walked 3,600 miles

    through the desert just to get home to his wife, who was dying a slow death

    from a rattlesnake wound. As soon as he got through the door,

    he kissed her so hard her bones cracked. Tonight I’m reminded of this

    as you slowly pull off your shirt, lifting it over the top of your head

    with both hands as I’ve seen you do countless times before we made love

    on the floor, the table, the dining room. The thin white cotton falls

    to the carpet like a snake shedding its skin.

    You reveal yourself to me.

    Every scar climbing up the inside of your arms another mile,

    the ones that cross each other in the middle like railroad tracks

    another two miles, the ones that shine the brightest- three.

    I count them and realize that each one was a reason for survival,

    and survival is not a number divisible by any other number.

    So, instead of arithmetic, I hold you tonight,

    picturing the red blood cells making their way through

    your blood vessels, which would be over 80,000 miles long

    if laid out end to end. When I feel your collarbones become wet,

    I take a tear on the tip of my finger and gently slide it

    into your mouth. Here, I said. Taste this.

    You’ll never find anything else like it. That’s what surviving tastes like.

    But in my head I was really thinking about that old Egyptian man,

    and how he eventually made it home to his wife, yet here I am,

    not even a millimeter away from you,

    and it still feels like the Grand Canyon between us.

    rasec-wizzlbang-blog

    Can someone calculate for me the volume of loch ness in liters so I can figure out how many humans you’d need to drink it

    rasec-wizzlbang

    Ok I had to search a bit, but it’s apparently 7,448,160,000,000 liters? this is a problem, the upper limit of the average human stomach is just four liters, and even then that’s a very uncomfortable amount of water to have in there. Which means there aren’t enough humans on this planet to drink all of loch ness

    jesus-lizard-journal

    what if they drank their fill and then peed it out somewhere where the liquid wouldn’t just run back into loch ness? Then they could go back and drink more the next morning. How many days would that take? Would we end up with a new loch made entirely of pee? Loch piss? 

    rasec-wizzlbang

    possibly, but thats not taking rainfall into account and the amount of water fed into it every day by the River Oich

    sindilex

    The upper limit for the human stomach is about 4 liters. It takes the human body about 45 to 60 minutes to absorb/expel 1 liter of water (for the sake of this math problem just go with 60 (1 hour). An average person sleeps 8 hours. An average person spends about 3 hours eating (1 hour for each meal of the day) A day is 24 hours.

    1 person alone: 572 billion days or all 7.3 billion people just 78.5 days, roughly. Assuming no one died of e coli or something.

    rasec-wizzlbang

    this is good, but again, this doesn’t take rainfall or the river oich into account. It would have to be done during a dryer season in scottland and the river would need to be dammed.

    severalowls

    There is no dryer season in Scotland though. It hasn’t stopped raining since Roman times.

    You might need a second team of people to hold umbrellas over the drinking people.

    rasec-wizzlbang

    the rain would still drip off the umbrellas and into the loch, this is gonna be a problem… someone calculate the annual rainfall over Scotland, can 7 billion people outdrink it?

    frog-and-toad-are-friends

    The western Highlands, where Loch Ness is located, is one of the rainiest places in Europe, with a yearly average rainfall of 4,577 millimeters (12.54 millimeters a day).  Loch Ness’ surface area is 56 square kilometers.  If it rains 12.54 millimeters every day, then Loch Ness will gain 702,240 cubic meters (over 700 million liters) of water per day.  Everyone will have to drink 0.1 extra liters of water to keep up.

    rasec-wizzlbang

    that sounds doable! our goal is now clear

    cocobutterbella

    ok but why tho?

    rasec-wizzlbang

    if you can think of a better way to find Nessie I’d love to hear it