The Simple Math of Cheap Ice Cream & Why It Melts So Fast

Discovery Magazine: Home Made Ice Cream

More ice cream science: the scoop baking

Giant Easter Egg Maths … METRIC

Good News for Chocoholics

To get the right texture Easter Eggs are made from sugar or sucrose and not from corn syrup. But chocolate contains lots and lots of sugar.

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Guylian Sea Shells:

Weight Sea Shell: 120 g

Weight Sugar: 48g

% sugar = 48/120 x 100 = 40%

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This is a Guylian Luxury Easter Egg. It can also be used as a designer handbag, I guess.

Guylian Easter Eggs:

Weight Easter Egg: 100g

Weight Sugar: 52g

% sugar = 52/100 x 100 = 52%

You’ll find nutrition data here.

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Easter Challenge:

You will find the largest Chocolate Easter Egg ever here.

This egg is 10.39 m high and weighs 7,200 kg , but  it is ugly. I like the GUYLIAN GIANT EGG (below) because it looks good and we also know how much sugar is in the egg.

This Giant Egg was made in 2005 in Belgium by chocolate maker Guylian.

Statistics:

Height: 8.32 m  

Weight: 1950 kg chocolate

No. Chocolatiers: 26

No. Chocolate bars: 50,000

Total time: 525 hrs

Easter Challenge for Chocoholics

The amount of sugar in the giant egg weighs as much as a Fiat Punto.

Math Joke 3:How long will it take you to grow a really bad 70s-styles haircut?

The follicle diagram (above) came from bgoffforensics blog. More on hair growth rates here.

QUESTION 1:

How long to grow that really bad 70s style hair cut?

The length of Fabio’s hair (below) is approx 50cm.

t = 50/1.25 months

t=40 months          

t = 3 Years 4 months!!!!

Is it worth the effort? Ha!

QUESTION 2: 

The growth rates of 1.25 cm/month or 0.5 inches/month are rounded off. Calculations using these growth rates will produce different answers for very large numbers (as above). Read more about the above story in the Daily Mail, UK here. By the way, Asha has been growing her hair for 25 years. Her hair weighs 3 stone or 19 kg. You can find more hair records including the World’s longest ear hair here.

QUESTION 3:

Natasha lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Read more about Natasha in the Daily Mail here. Once again Mathspig has rounded off the length of hair for easy calculation. The Daily Mail puts Natasha’s ‘mane’ at 5 feet 2 inches or 157 cm. This is the length of hair to be cut off. So Mathspig adjusted the length to 180cm or the approx length of her longest hair.

MATH JOKE 9: Seriously Funny

4. If you are involved in a car chase, hijacking, explosion, volcanic eruption or alien invasion, you will not go into shock.

Here are just a few of the popular disaster movies:
Avalanche (2001), Earthquake (1974), Armageddon (Involves meteors 1998), Deep Impact (More meteors 1998), 2012 (Tsunamis, earthquakes, the lot. 2009), Twister (tornadoes 1996), Backdraft (Fire. 1991) and Towering Inferno (They don’t make thunderous movie titles like that anymore. (1974)  

But what percentage of people involved in, say, an explosion suffer from SHOCK! There are many statistics about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) available. In one excellent study in The National Centre for PTSD Journal involved an explosion in a paint factory in Norway (1976), the 246 employees were ranked for their exposure to shock as follows:.

A. 66 Narrow escape

B. 59 Involved but not in danger

C. 121 Not present on the day.

 80% Group A suffered shock and PTSD. Both Groups A & B showed symptoms of PTSD 7 months later. If, say, a plane crashed into your school sports field and your class survived with minor injuries calculate  how many students in your maths class would go into SHOCK and how many would be left to take action using the above statistics.

These stats can also be used as a fraction or decimal exercise using 0.8 or 4/5 as the fraction of students in shock.

More information at the Health Dept WA

NOTE: Many schools in Australia today not only practise fire drills but terrorist attack lockdowns.

Trick 6: Freaky Math Medium

Write the word carrot inside your math text book. Do not show students.

When Mathspig was a mathspiglet we used to play this trick. It doesn’t work on everyone, but it works  often enough.

Ask a student to say 15 times 15 fifteen times.

Then ask them to name a vegetable. Students say carrot 90% (I’m guessing) of the time.

To make this trick more dramatic send 10 students out of the class before you begin and tell the other half what you are about to do. Students return one at a time. How often do they say ‘carrot’? What % of students say carrot? 

And the Oscar for Best Mathematical Performance Goes to …..

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And the Oscar for Best Mathematical Performance Goes to …..

Ben Zauzmer

Ben Zauzmer, a Harvard Applied Math graduate who has a 75 per cent success rate in predicting the winners of Oscar Awards every year, has correctly predicted 20 of 21 winners in 2018 Oscars, which is a success rate of 95%. 

How does he do it? He gathers thousands of data points on Oscar ceremonies over the past two decades – such as categories movies are nominated in, other award results, and aggregate critic scores – and he uses statistics to calculate how good a predictor each of those metrics is in each Oscar category. Then, he plugs in the numbers and that gives him the % chance that each film will win in each category according to  the Boston Globe.

Ben, who writes for The Hollywood Reporter, uses his mathematical model to produce  Bar Graphs like this:

This year the Best Picture was a close call, but Ben’s Mathematical Prediciton was correct.