Topic: Useful information?

[hans]

Might win you some m&m's or something.

http://lifehacker.com/5324692/guess-the-number-of-mms-in-a-jar

Simple math of volumes and packing fractions I guess. Now to go find a challenge somewhere.

[micah]

for those who don't want to watch his whole boring video here's the short of it:

if you know the volume of the jar you can accurately estimate with this formula

(volume in mils / .715) x .665

so his 1150mil jar could hold 1608 M&M's (which have a known volume of 0.715 mils) if there was no space between the M&M's.  But there is space. Luckily the randomness of that space averages out to be about 66.5%.  So 1608 * 0.665 = 1069.   He hand-counted them and said there were 1072.  So the formula works, in this case it was only off by 3 M&Ms.

[charlie]

I watched the whole thing.

Pretty cool, but there are too many variables you need to know to make it useful for anything other than M&Ms in a container you know the volume of.

[Phil]

WTF is a 'mil'?

edit: Ah got it, it's just an abbreviation of millilitre.

[Govtcheez]

This will be very useful in all the places that have "guess the m&m" jars that are really graduated cylinders

[ober]

I think people are going to disqualify you if you walk up to the jar and start taking measurements to get the volume.