This morning Sal and I were speculating about how much of Durham county we could cover if Sal spent her entire doctoral scholarship on croissants. It isn’t important why we were wondering this. What is important is that after a night spent drinking I often feel compelled to calculate stupid things. This isn’t helped by the fact that I suck at maths, which I assume leads to many of my calculations being wildly inaccurate. But here goes:With Sal’s rather generous scholarship we could afford about 45 thousand croissants, assuming a price of about $2 per croissant.
I checked this morning and a croissant from the Guglhupf German bakery, near our house, measures approximately 14 cm by 10 cm. Assuming no croissant tessellation is possible each occupies a surface area of 140 square centimeters.
So if Sal’s entire scholarship was spent on croissants we could cover about 6.3 million square centimeters of Durham County, which equates to about 0.063 ha.
Needless to say, this is rather disappointing. I had been hoping our croissant paving would be more spectacular.
To address this problem I did some croissant-paving sensitivity analysis (seriously, I used Excel) and found the single factor that is having the greatest impact on the area you can pave is the price of croissants.
Conclusion, if you are planning on paving Durham Country, or anywhere for that matter, with croissants I recommend finding the cheapest source of croissants you can. Although the Guglhupf German bakery does make very nice croissants they aren’t good for paving.
5 comments:
have you thought about using, ordinary bread instead of fancy french stuff, its probably cheaper! therefore increasing surface area at no extra cost!!!
Good suggestion but the point is to use croissants. Nic
Well you see the interesting thing about this article is? is that croissants are really full of fat...and they are bad for your teeth!!! thats why my mummy said i can't eat them!!! (by the way i'm 35)
Oh fuck man.
People once used the internet for porn and the occaisonal music download. But to calculate the area of croissants Sal's scholarship could cover, and then publishing it on the web reaches a new low. How low 'dat brow?
Reeeeel low.
nice.
if i may make one quick suggestion, without doing any calcs myself:
if you take advantage of the croissanty-shaped shape of the croissants and relax your definition of cover: by laying them next to each other in a semi-orderly fashion, all of them facing the same way, you could get the effect of having covered an area twice the size. that way one would also be able to tell from further afar that the bakegoods are in fact croissants.
- jostein
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