But my favouritest ,developed by Patrick Len, is using m&ms to demonstrate half life in radioactive substances and therefore write an exponential equation.
m+m ACTIVITY:
Throw a fixed no. m&ms on a table. Mathspig chose 128 m&ms for a very good reason. Eat the ones with the m showing. Count remainder. Throw again. Eat the ones with the m showing. Count remained. Keep doing this. You will end up with results like the following. (Not identical as chance is involved)
Wow! m&m’s and exponential equations. How yummy is that!!!!!!
Are you looking for a new and exciting way to calculate the volume of, well, things maths teachers ask you to calculate the volume of? Like what? You know, cubes or cylinders or cones or stuff. Well, today mathspiggies, we have the perfect solution for you. Yes!
We will calculate volume by counting m&ms!!!! Do I hear any complaints???? Anyone!!! Right!
WARNING: You may need a ship load of m&ms!!! Just saying.
Mathspig salutes CWanamaker for doing maths over and above the call of duty by actually measuring how many m&ms fit in various containers. He has provided us with the RPR (RAndom Packing Ratio) for m&ms(below) and you will find his experiments here.
Two things you may need to know:
1 fl ounce (US) = 29.6 ml
1cm3 = 1 ml
If you are like me, mathspiggies, you will be amaaaazed how many m&ms it takes to fill, say, a coffee mug. Nevertheless, you can calculate the volume from the no. of m&ms and you will find the answers here:m&m maths answers
Of course, mathspiggies, we can do the reverse maths and cheat … and use our superior maths skills to calculate the no. of m&ms in a cookie jar and then you WIN the cookie jar full of m&ms at the school fair.
There are two types of ingredients in shampoo. One type cleans your hair. The other type strokes your emotions.
Shampoo has one main ingredient:
DETERGENT
The two most common shampoo detergents are ammonium lauryl sulphate and ammonium laureth sulphate. That’s all you need to clean your hair. All those shampoo bottles. All that supermarket shelf space offer THE SAME PRODUCT.
Other ingredients include: perfume, dye, preservative, foaming agent, acid (The problem is hair swells in an alkaline solution eg with soap when rinsed out the hair shrinks making knots impossible to brush out. ARggghhhhh!), thickeners, thinners, sheen additive, pearlesence powder (makes shampoo look pearly) etc
According to Steve Antczak, Co-author of Cosmetics Unmasked: Your family guide to safe cosmetics and allergy-free toiletries,
A typical shampoo is mostly water, containing between 5 and 20 per cent detergent, with shampoo for dry hair containing less detergent than shampoo for greasy hair.
My new shampoo, Sunlight Dish Detergent, has just four ingredients. It’s runny and slightly acidic, smells vaguely lemony, doesn’t foam excessively and looks anemic.
The UK supermarket chain, Asda, is currently trailing 3D in-store printing of mini-me figurines. Cost: £ 40 (€ 47 or $Aus 67 or $USA 64)
Customers can buy 3D coloured versions of any person or object including the family car or dog (if Trixy can keep still for 2 mins) scaled down to an 8-inch figure.
Now you too can play games with yourself. (Warning: Avoid wording involving ‘play with’ and ‘yourself’.)
It takes two minutes using a hand-held scanner to create the 3D image and 6 – 8 hours for the 3D printer to produce the figure.
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The Virtual You
3D body scanning already exists so you can create a 1:1 scale avatar (A Mevatar, perhaps?) of youself for online shopping. By combining this technology with 3D printing the scaled-down Mini Me concept was born.
YOu can walk your personal exact-scale Avatar into an online shop and try on clothes!
3D PRINTING: THE MATHS
Maths is involved at every stage of the Mini Me production to produce the scanner, the scanner program, the printer and the printer program.
It is the scale that is intriguing.
The scale used by the 3D printer is approx 1:10 ratio.
What?
According to the BBC average man in England is 5ft 9in (175.3cm) tall and weighed 13.16 stone (83.6kg) and woman is 11 stone (70.2kg) and 5ft 3in tall (161.6cm).
3D printers use materials from brass to silver to ceramics so figurines can be quite heavy. Assuming the ceramic material has a similar density to the human body, the 1:10 scale male figurine would weight over 1 stone (8 kg) and a female 1 stone plus (7 kg)!
Will shoppers be staggering home in York carrying 7kg figurines?????
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Wait a minute:
1:10 scale along each axis produces an overall scale of 1:1,000
Mini Me Mathspig is just 1/1,000 of Big Mathspig
or one little cube in the pack of 1,000.
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The supermarket figurine @ 1:1,000 scale by volume (and, assuming, weight too) would weight 83 gm ( 3 ounces) for men and 70 gm (2.5 ounces) for women. That’s more like it. The figurines will be, in fact, a little heavier as customers will be scanned wearing clothes and shoes, we hope, or the scanning sessions at the supermarket will be really weird.
