Post by Padre Romero on Apr 16, 2007 19:33:45 GMT -5
What with all the bad stuff that's been happening recently, I though something cheery and dull would be best for everyone. Here's an idea I had a LONG time ago, but finally did the math for, now you can all see what I do when I'm bored. if you want the lyrics to the song i'm referring to, you can find them here:
www.shanemacgowan.com/lyrics/irishrover.shtml
“The Irish Rover” is an old Irish drinking song about an impossibly large ship that meets an unfortunate end. the song is featured in a few of the things I plan to write. Using the lyrics in the song, I will attempt to bring some physical absurdities to light.
The boat is described only briefly: “We'd an elegant craft, it was rigged 'fore and aft And how the trade winds drove her She had twenty-three masts and she stood several blasts And they called her the Irish Rover” We also know the narration takes place: “In the year of our Lord, eighteen hundred and six,”
As such, I will assume that the Irish rover is a craft roughly 8 times larger than a typical Barquetine sailing vessel from the turn of the 19th century, which is a wooden craft, about 37 Meters long, Rigged at the front and back and has 3 masts. This makes our boat about 300 Meters long, and (assuming we keep the length-to-beam ratio about about 6.5, as is usual in ships of that time…regardless of how ridiculous that is) 50 Meters wide at its widest point. I’ll assume it is about 20 meters deep, as per the rest of the scaling-up. As a minor side note, you would need literal hurricane force winds to even SHIFT this boat in the water, much less move it forward an appreciable distance.
Obviously, this is a big-ass boat, but wait until you see the cargo.
According to the drinking song:
“We had one million bags of the best Sligo rags
We had two million barrels of stones
We had three million sides of old blind horses' hides
We had four million barrels of bones
We had five million hogs and six million dogs
And seven million barrels of porter
We had eight million bales of old nanny goats' tails
In the hold of the Irish Rover”
I have bolded the last line to indicate that the narrator specifically notes that this obscenely huge cargo was within the hold of the ship…not stacked on top. (Why exactly the Irish need to haul four million barrels of bones to Manhattan is another question entirely. Oh well, at least we know where the porter is going.) Here’s some quick math with explanations:
A “Sligo Rag” is a rag from Sligo, a county in Ireland. I’m going to assume the Irish in Sligo stamp out rags as per the instructions of the UN committee on domestic upkeep, which defines the standard weight of a rag as “The weight of the dishcloth in my sink right now” or about 25 grams, Assuming a “Bag” is maybe 20 or so rags, we have a weight of:
.025 X 20 X 1,000,000 = 500,000 KG
A “Stone” is pretty obvious, I’m going to assume the Irish and the British think alike for once (probably not a safe assumption, but I’m in a rush). The standard sized stone has been a unit of measurement in Britain since the 13th century…it’s about 7 KG…assuming these two million barrels average out to about 7 Kg. per stone and we can fit 5 in a barrel, we have a weight of:
7 X 5 X 2,000,000 = 70,000,000 KG
A “side of horses hide” is tough to calculate. Perhaps someone could do a better job of this, feel free to write me if that is the case. In humans, skin comprises about 15% of your body weight, I’m going to assume (perhaps wrongly) that this carries over to horses. This means that a horses hide weighs about 100 KG, or 15% of 700 KG, which is a decent weigh in on a good sized draft horse. However, the poem states that these are “old blind horses hides” so, I’ll drop the weight by another 10% to 90 KG…3 Million horses hides weighs:
90 X 3,000,000= 270,000,000 KG
As aforementioned, the crew of the “Irish Rover” saw fit to haul 4 million barrels of bones on their trans-Atlantic journey. I’m somewhat at a loss as to how to calculate the weight of this…untold seconds of research (in my friend’s anatomy textbook and confirmed through wikipedia) lead me to the conclusion that 20% of your body mass is bone. Assuming an average human weighs 70 kg, and that you can fit one human skeleton per barrel (A low estimate indeed) this skeletal stash still ups the “rover’s” tonnage by:
14 X 4,000,000 = 56,000,000 Kg
Five million hogs, assuming these are of the domesticated Yorkshire variety, and each weighs an average of 150 KG (A rough estimate given by my dorm floor’s hog expert, yes, we have one). This gives us:
150 X 5,000,000 = 750,000,000 Kg
Six million dogs, assuming these are all Irish setters (why not?), will weigh an average of 25 Kg, which means altogether:
25 X 6,000,000 = 150,000,000
For simplicities sake, we are going to assume the crew drinks all seven million barrels of porter on their 7 year voyage. If these are traditional English wine barrels, they will hold A little over 100 liters of porter, for a combined total of 700,000,000 liters of liquid. Enough to fill several thousand Olympic-sized swimming pools. This is more wine that currently exists in the world by a long shot.
Eight million bales of old nanny-goats tails, assuming they each weigh as much as half a bale of hay, amounts to roughly 250 Kg, or this much altogether. Keep in mind that each “bale” is going to contain several thousand tails…this means we’re dealing with several billion nanny-goat tails altogether, which is likely more nanny goats than have existed in the entire span of human history
250 KG X 8,000,000 = 2,000,000,000 KG
We aren’t quite done yet…we still have 13 million barrels to account for. Assuming they are standard wine barrels, we have an average weight of about 40 KG per barrel. So altogether.
40 X 13,000,000 = 520,000,000
Conclusions:
Even excluding the logistical supplies necessary to feed the hogs, dogs, and crew, the Irish Rover is hauling 4,240,500,000 Kg of cargo, roughly equal to the weight of everyone in Detroit. Keep in mind, this mass is concentrated into an area with a volume of only 300,000 cubic meters, even assuming half of the entire ship is devoted to cargo space…that’s something like 30,000 Kg per square meter, something to the order of 40 Volkswagen beetles.
Obviously, the trade winds aren’t going to be blowing this thing to New York. If the Irish had invented fusion power in the mid-ninteeth century, it might have actually gone somewhere. It is probably for the best that this thing would have sunk seconds after being filled to capacity. Once accelerated to any appreciable speed, this thing would be nearly impossible to stop. Its eventual fate is as follows: “Then the ship struck a rock; oh Lord what a shock
The bulkhead was turned right over
We turned nine times around - then the poor old dog was drowned
Now I'm the last of the Irish Rover”
In reality, the amount of force necessary to accelerate this ship to sailing speed would be immense. In fact, 4,240,500,000 Kg moving at even a mild sailing speed of 10 knots would be more than enough to demolish any rock in its path, in fact, had this thing run aground anywhere in the continental US, it would have a noticeable impact on the other side of a world, producing a seismic event not unlike a meteor impact at it’s point of impact.
www.shanemacgowan.com/lyrics/irishrover.shtml
“The Irish Rover” is an old Irish drinking song about an impossibly large ship that meets an unfortunate end. the song is featured in a few of the things I plan to write. Using the lyrics in the song, I will attempt to bring some physical absurdities to light.
The boat is described only briefly: “We'd an elegant craft, it was rigged 'fore and aft And how the trade winds drove her She had twenty-three masts and she stood several blasts And they called her the Irish Rover” We also know the narration takes place: “In the year of our Lord, eighteen hundred and six,”
As such, I will assume that the Irish rover is a craft roughly 8 times larger than a typical Barquetine sailing vessel from the turn of the 19th century, which is a wooden craft, about 37 Meters long, Rigged at the front and back and has 3 masts. This makes our boat about 300 Meters long, and (assuming we keep the length-to-beam ratio about about 6.5, as is usual in ships of that time…regardless of how ridiculous that is) 50 Meters wide at its widest point. I’ll assume it is about 20 meters deep, as per the rest of the scaling-up. As a minor side note, you would need literal hurricane force winds to even SHIFT this boat in the water, much less move it forward an appreciable distance.
Obviously, this is a big-ass boat, but wait until you see the cargo.
According to the drinking song:
“We had one million bags of the best Sligo rags
We had two million barrels of stones
We had three million sides of old blind horses' hides
We had four million barrels of bones
We had five million hogs and six million dogs
And seven million barrels of porter
We had eight million bales of old nanny goats' tails
In the hold of the Irish Rover”
I have bolded the last line to indicate that the narrator specifically notes that this obscenely huge cargo was within the hold of the ship…not stacked on top. (Why exactly the Irish need to haul four million barrels of bones to Manhattan is another question entirely. Oh well, at least we know where the porter is going.) Here’s some quick math with explanations:
A “Sligo Rag” is a rag from Sligo, a county in Ireland. I’m going to assume the Irish in Sligo stamp out rags as per the instructions of the UN committee on domestic upkeep, which defines the standard weight of a rag as “The weight of the dishcloth in my sink right now” or about 25 grams, Assuming a “Bag” is maybe 20 or so rags, we have a weight of:
.025 X 20 X 1,000,000 = 500,000 KG
A “Stone” is pretty obvious, I’m going to assume the Irish and the British think alike for once (probably not a safe assumption, but I’m in a rush). The standard sized stone has been a unit of measurement in Britain since the 13th century…it’s about 7 KG…assuming these two million barrels average out to about 7 Kg. per stone and we can fit 5 in a barrel, we have a weight of:
7 X 5 X 2,000,000 = 70,000,000 KG
A “side of horses hide” is tough to calculate. Perhaps someone could do a better job of this, feel free to write me if that is the case. In humans, skin comprises about 15% of your body weight, I’m going to assume (perhaps wrongly) that this carries over to horses. This means that a horses hide weighs about 100 KG, or 15% of 700 KG, which is a decent weigh in on a good sized draft horse. However, the poem states that these are “old blind horses hides” so, I’ll drop the weight by another 10% to 90 KG…3 Million horses hides weighs:
90 X 3,000,000= 270,000,000 KG
As aforementioned, the crew of the “Irish Rover” saw fit to haul 4 million barrels of bones on their trans-Atlantic journey. I’m somewhat at a loss as to how to calculate the weight of this…untold seconds of research (in my friend’s anatomy textbook and confirmed through wikipedia) lead me to the conclusion that 20% of your body mass is bone. Assuming an average human weighs 70 kg, and that you can fit one human skeleton per barrel (A low estimate indeed) this skeletal stash still ups the “rover’s” tonnage by:
14 X 4,000,000 = 56,000,000 Kg
Five million hogs, assuming these are of the domesticated Yorkshire variety, and each weighs an average of 150 KG (A rough estimate given by my dorm floor’s hog expert, yes, we have one). This gives us:
150 X 5,000,000 = 750,000,000 Kg
Six million dogs, assuming these are all Irish setters (why not?), will weigh an average of 25 Kg, which means altogether:
25 X 6,000,000 = 150,000,000
For simplicities sake, we are going to assume the crew drinks all seven million barrels of porter on their 7 year voyage. If these are traditional English wine barrels, they will hold A little over 100 liters of porter, for a combined total of 700,000,000 liters of liquid. Enough to fill several thousand Olympic-sized swimming pools. This is more wine that currently exists in the world by a long shot.
Eight million bales of old nanny-goats tails, assuming they each weigh as much as half a bale of hay, amounts to roughly 250 Kg, or this much altogether. Keep in mind that each “bale” is going to contain several thousand tails…this means we’re dealing with several billion nanny-goat tails altogether, which is likely more nanny goats than have existed in the entire span of human history
250 KG X 8,000,000 = 2,000,000,000 KG
We aren’t quite done yet…we still have 13 million barrels to account for. Assuming they are standard wine barrels, we have an average weight of about 40 KG per barrel. So altogether.
40 X 13,000,000 = 520,000,000
Conclusions:
Even excluding the logistical supplies necessary to feed the hogs, dogs, and crew, the Irish Rover is hauling 4,240,500,000 Kg of cargo, roughly equal to the weight of everyone in Detroit. Keep in mind, this mass is concentrated into an area with a volume of only 300,000 cubic meters, even assuming half of the entire ship is devoted to cargo space…that’s something like 30,000 Kg per square meter, something to the order of 40 Volkswagen beetles.
Obviously, the trade winds aren’t going to be blowing this thing to New York. If the Irish had invented fusion power in the mid-ninteeth century, it might have actually gone somewhere. It is probably for the best that this thing would have sunk seconds after being filled to capacity. Once accelerated to any appreciable speed, this thing would be nearly impossible to stop. Its eventual fate is as follows: “Then the ship struck a rock; oh Lord what a shock
The bulkhead was turned right over
We turned nine times around - then the poor old dog was drowned
Now I'm the last of the Irish Rover”
In reality, the amount of force necessary to accelerate this ship to sailing speed would be immense. In fact, 4,240,500,000 Kg moving at even a mild sailing speed of 10 knots would be more than enough to demolish any rock in its path, in fact, had this thing run aground anywhere in the continental US, it would have a noticeable impact on the other side of a world, producing a seismic event not unlike a meteor impact at it’s point of impact.
;D
