Nerds Make Science Fun!

After stumbling upon an interesting post on this website about the amount of money in the Geico “Kash” stack (I see a mascot replacement for Geico in the future), I decided to do some research into the matter myself.  Why, you ask?  Because I honestly have nothing better to do besides disprove an obscure claim about a ridiculous insurance company gimmick.

Anyways, the article posted previously stated that the Geico Kash stack contains 254 five dollar bills, or a total of $1,270.  While I do appreciate the use of mathematics to try to solve this problem which has been vexing mathematicians since the beginning of time, I think that this is just one of those things that is more easily solved with a bit of observation.

The Geico Kash stack has somehow become a very pervasive image in society today. For this reason, it was a fairly easy matter to find a picture of this popular embodiment of currency.  I found my money picture (no pun intended - okay, maybe it was sort of intended) in an issue of Readers’ Digest (June 2009 issue, page 169, if anyone actually cares enough to check).  By simply counting the number of bills in the money stack, I found that there are only around 45-60 bills in the stack of money.  I acquired this number by counting up the number of bills one could actually distinguish in the stack and then adding a small sum to the total because of the possibility that the edges of some of the bills were bent and did not show up at the front of the stack.  The grand total, then, comes to $225-$300.

I am sure that my previous assertion is recieving some incredulous scoffs at this moment (assuming the reader has even bothered to read this far).  After all, what is mere observation compared to cold, hard mathematics?  Well, I may not be able to concretely back up my claims, but I can at least disprove the math behind the previous conclusion of 254 bills.  First of all, the height of the stack of bills was wrong in the original calculation.  The top of the Geico Kash stack is not flat.  Rather, it is in the shape of a parabola.  As a result, the height of the stack of cash cannot be accurately measured by taking the height of the stack of cash at the edges.  Rather, the closest estimate can only come from the center of the stack, where it is most tightly bound.  Even this, however, is not the correct height.  Near the end of the previous post about the Geico Kash stack, it is mentioned that “compression” might distort the calculations.  On the contrary, it is actually expansion that invalidates these calculations.  To take the height of any geometric solid, the object in question has to be just that, solid.  The stack of Geico cash is obviously not solid, and would contain some air gaps that would mess up the measurement (for example, the “mouth” of the stack of money is a “hole” in the height).  Consequently, it is very difficult to correctly calculate the amount of bills in this stack of cash using geometrical applications.

Well, that’s that.  So as a result of my findings, I declare that Geico did NOT attempt to distort the truth of their customers’ potential savings.

- DH (guest writer)

I took an online (12th grade) psychology trivia quiz, and I got 16/21, even though I guessed on a few.

Keep in mind I’m a sophmore in high school, whose only experience with psychology comes from skimming through an AP prep book and a college textbook on the subject.

This kind of makes me wonder,how do we determine just how old someone has to be before he/she is accepted into a certain class?

-T

I actually got the questions yesterday, but I’m posting today due to the idiocy of another.

If you want the questions, they’re probably on Collegeboard’s website. I’ll just give what I thought about them here.

1: It’s the obligatory equilibrium question, and it involved a few tricks with Kw and the definitions of pH and pOH.

2: Gases question. Pretty straightforward. I bs’ed part g, since I had jack for ideas.

3: Rate law question. I ended up with a rate law that was 1/2 order with respect to Chlorine gas.

4a: This was easy. Next.
4b: I wasn’t sure what to put here. I did the ammonia + hydrogen ion –> ammonium ion reaction.
4c: I bet a lot of people forgot about the fume hood, and said the mass would be less because of escaping gas.

5: A question that wasn’t too bad, but involved some algebra and just used Gibbs free energy.

6: Do you know your periodic table trends? Just move along.

Lucky for me, no electrochemistry questions.

-T

Due to technical difficulties (The school forgot to pass them back) I won’t be able to post the AP questions until monday or later.

In other events, one of my friends told me that, in Angels and Demons, some characters form the God Particle (Higgs Boson).

Considering his record (Da Vinci Code), I’m wondering if he knows what the God Particle is, what it does, and how he wrote they discovered it (as well as if any physicists have tried that combination).

Also, how’s that Hadron Collider doing?

Well, I’ll admit I haven’t looked into the situation much, but there’s this:

As it appeared on the Philip Defranco Show:

Actual (doesn’t look edited) footage:

Will leave your hand very sore, and not looking forward to doing those motions anytime soon.

I’m talking about the AP test. Get your mind outta the gutta.

I’m not supposed to disclose anything yet, but I’ll just say that I was writing like a madman in the free response section, I got lucky and wasn’t tested on anything I didn’t know well, and that I’m pretty sure I got a 5.

Of course, I’ll post the FRQs on here.

Personally, I think this just reinforces the idea that AP stands for Asian Pride.

Also, I’m taking an AP on Tuesday. Of course, I’ll bring out the free response questions two days after the test.

Hope you enjoy

-T

PS: One last thing, I heard this joke:
People said that we’d have a black president when pigs fly. We got Obama. 100 days later, swine flu (flew).

Well, I was going to write something about the swine flu, but instead, I’ll let Cracked.com columnist Daniel O’Brien do that for me.

-T