[ExI] fermi flood was: RE: California storms

[Giovanni Santostasi]

I love Fermi's problems, they are very important to understanding the world
around us, orders of magnitude questions can give us important insights
about the universe.

Talking about orders of magnitude and scaling properties my Power Law Model
for BTC is getting some attention. If you want to watch this great
interview I did with finance YouTube celebrity Andrei Jikh and send me a
like I would appreciate it. Let me know what you think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UX8LPbMGyl4&t=196s

Thanks,
Giovanni


On Tue, Feb 6, 2024 at 5:19 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: spike at rainier66.com <spike at rainier66.com>
> ...
>
> >...Consequently... plenty of people come to the USA and choose homeless
> here rather than homeful wherever they come from.  If one is going to live
> outdoors, an overpass or under a bridge makes perfect sense...The masses
> want freedom and capitalism, even if it means they must camp out here to
> get
> there.  spike
>
>
> I have been all over the map on this one, so I decided to post something
> over on a yet-uncommented part of the thought-map.
>
> The high schools play a game named for Enrico Fermi who was really good at
> this: estimating the order of magnitude.  An example of a fermi question
> would be: How many neutrons are in a fig newton?
>
> A good player would estimate its mass at about 10 to 20 grams, mostly
> carbon, a mole of carbon is about 12 grams, so about a mole times six
> neutrons per carbon atom, so 3.6E24 neutrons approximately, and depending
> on
> how you estimate mass, the answer might be either 24 or 25.
>
> Local flooding: there is a footbridge across the local waterway.  I was
> over
> there during last year's rains and noticed that the water is the color of
> chocolate milk.  I found a cup and scooped out a water sample, let it
> settle
> and observed that you aren't far off if you estimate the water is 10%
> sediment by mass, perhaps 5% by volume.  There really is that much silt and
> soil washing down that channel.
>
> I was over there yesterday and estimated, Fermi style, the average depth
> across there, about a meter, and its width, about ten meters.  When the
> water is that color, as it is now, the flow rate is likely higher than a
> meter a second, but a meter per second as a Fermi-ey estimate will get you
> there.  So... after a hard rain, as we have been having all week, about ten
> cubic meters per second flow rate down that channel, at about 10% silt.
>
> Fermi question: in kg, the mass of silt carried by the Penitentia Creek
> after a hard rain per second.  Answer: 3.  10^3 kg per second.  A ton of
> silt per second.  This process can go on for hours, or days.
>
> Second question: where does all that silt go?
>
> It gives one a new sense of how deltas form, and what happens when we need
> the space to build homes, so we defeat nature's course and build a single
> narrow channel where a vast river delta used to be.
>
> Prediction: eventually that channel will silt up and restrict flow rate,
> causing water to rise along the course of that river.  Consequence: the
> homeless living under those bridges will get washed out more regularly.
>
> spike
>
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