September 24, 2014

That’s just a guess

oranges

While it’s nowhere near as annoying as Phoenix Organics “Don’t drink science“, Charlie’s could do better than ‘just a guess’ as to whether there are a million oranges in this truck

If there are ten oranges in a litre of juice, there are ten thousand in a cubic metre of juice, so a million oranges would make 100 cubic metres of juice. The little juice bottles probably don’t pack that efficiently, so you’d need more than 100 cubic metres of truck.

So, how big is a truck?  A standard twenty-foot container is 6.1m long, 2.44m wide, and 2.59m high, with a volume of 38.5 cubic metres.  That truck doesn’t look three times as big as a twenty-foot container to me.

There could be a hundred thousand oranges in that truck. I don’t think a million is feasible.

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Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »

Comments

  • avatar

    Alternative calculation

    Note the curious order of the quantifiers in the sentence. Assume truck contains >1L of their juice. Lower bound: 10 oranges in the truck.

    10 years ago

  • avatar
    James Sukias

    Also weight loading capacity of a truck that size 15-20 tonnes max. so 15-20 m3.

    10 years ago

    • avatar
      Thomas Lumley

      That actually doesn’t fit too badly with my volume guess and a plausible packing density

      10 years ago