Avacado's Number and the Primaries

[HassleCat]

There was this Italian guy named Armada Avacado, who lived on the Isle of Sardines, and he invented this tree that bore really delicious guacamole. He also invented this huge number for counting large groups of things.

I am told it is 6.02 times ten to the 23rd power. I don't know what that means, but it has the word "power," so it must be pretty big. Scientists use it to count the number of molecules in a mole. I'm not sure why anyone would want to know how many molecules a mole has. I just hope the mole doesn't die when they do this.

Anyway, I thought Avacado's Number would be useful during the primaries to help us count our chickens before they're hatched. From what I read here on DU, it seems we need a really, really big number to do that, and Avacado might offer some relief. My candidate won this poll. My candidate won on the interwebs. My candidate is heavily favored among this group or that group. And all that means my candidate will win Avacado's Number of votes.

[Paulie]

1. Thanks a lot

Making chorizo quesadillas and have NO avocado.

[Xipe Totec]

2. Gogol's is bigger

[steve2470]

3. and here I was thinking you mangled his name, good job! :) nt

[Xipe Totec]

5. Impure Mathematics - If you liked avocado, you'll love this Tangent

In George H. Scherr, ed. The Best of The Journal of Irreproducible Results, p.147. Workman Publishing, 1983

Once upon a time (1/t), pretty little Polly Nomial was strolling across a field of vectors when she came to the edge of a singularly large matrix.

Now Polly was convergent and her mother had made it an absolute condition that she must never enter such an array without her brackets on. Polly, however, who had changed her variables that morning and was feeling particularly badly behaved, ignored this condition on the grounds that it was insufficient and made her way in amongst the complex elements.

Rows and columns enveloped her on all sides. Tangents approached her surface. She became tensor and tensor. Quite suddenly, three branches of a hyperbola touched her at a single point. She oscillated violently, lost all sense of directrix and went completely divergent. As she reached a turning point she tripped over a square root which was protruding from the erf and plunged headlong down a steep gradient. When she was differentiated once more she found herself, apparently alone, in a non-euclidean space.

https://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/polly.htm

[steve2470]

8. I never took calculus or whatever that is, but it's clever, thanks! nt

[HerbChestnut]

4. I can't tell if you're joking or not so...

The guy's name was Avogadro, and he came up with the mole. 1 mole is equal to 6.02x10^23 of anything. So if you had 1 mole of donuts, you would have 6.02x10^23 donuts, which is enough to reach the moon if you stacked them on top of each other (so I'm told). Either way, 1 mole votes is a whole heck of a lot of votes.

[HassleCat]

6. I think I could reach the moon if I ate a mole of donuts.

But it wouldn't be pretty.

[tk2kewl]

9. moley moley moley

[Thor_MN]

10. Those would be some mighty thin donuts...

If you stacked an Avogadro number of donuts from the sun to Neptune, you would have to get between 3 and 4 trillion to the inch to do it.

Neptune averages ~30 AU (an AU is ~93 million miles) = ~180,000,000,000,000 inches
into which you would need to stack
602,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 donuts....

[Jim Lane]

11. The stack would get just a LITTLE past the Moon.

Using a very conservative estimate of 1 centimeter as the height of each donut, a stack of 1 mole of donuts would be more than 600,000 light-years tall. That's more than three times the diameter of the entire Milky Way galaxy, and more than that if you're using decent donuts that are bigger and fluffier.

Whether the addition of the mass of that many donuts would cause the entire galaxy to collapse into a black hole is left as an exercise for the reader.

[HerbChestnut]

12. Without whipping out a calculator

600,000 light years seems a bit long.

[Jim Lane]

13. Do it in metric and you won't need a calculator

A mole is 6.02x10^23. Conservatively estimating each donut at 1 centimeter, the height of the stack is 6.02x10^23 centimeters or 6.02x10^21 meters. Per Wikipedia, a light-year is 9.4607×10^15 meters, i.e., a bit less than 10^16 meters. Therefore, the height of the stack is a bit more than 6x10^5 light-years, i.e., a bit more than 600,000 light-years.

I was also conservative in my astronomical comparison. Turning to the Wikipedia article on the Milky Way:

The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy that has a diameter usually considered to be about 100,000–120,000 light-years[27] but may be 150,000–180,000 light-years.

I took the highest listed value in saying that the Titanodonut would be more than three times the galactic diameter. It might be five or six times as great if we take the Milky Way as being "only" in the 100,000 to 120,000 light-year range.

Let me get away from donuts for a moment to address readers who might be surprised, as I was, that there's still any uncertainty about the size of the Milky Way. It turns out that we have a good idea of what stars are where. The Wikipedia article explains that it's just a matter of definition:

The Milky Way is the second-largest galaxy in the Local Group, with its stellar disk approximately 100,000 ly (30 kpc) in diameter, and, on average, approximately 1,000 ly (0.3 kpc) thick.[4][5] As a guide to the relative physical scale of the Milky Way, if the Solar System out to Neptune were the size of a US quarter (25mm), the Milky Way would be approximately the size of the continental United States.[43] A ring-like filament of stars wrapping around the Milky Way may actually belong to the Milky Way itself, rippling above and below the relatively flat galactic plane.[28] If so, that would mean a diameter of 150,000–180,000 light-years (46–55 kpc). {emphasis added}

[HerbChestnut]

14. Just crunched the numbers, and you're right.

Holy crow. I know that was a lot of donuts, but I didn't realize it was *that* many. Not even Home Simpson could handle that.

[Binkie The Clown]

7. Avacodo's number is right up there with Occam's Aftershave in importance to science.