The Stuff

Tonight, I was drinking bloody Marys and watching the Shark Week shows I had on my DVR, and they were talking about how sharks could smell 1 part blood in 1,000,000 parts of water. So I started to think: just how extraordinary is that really? Then I thought about farts, and how accurate a humans’ smell was. First I had to figure out how big a fart was. I found this site (http://www.heptune.com/farts.html) that says humans produce a half a liter of flatus a day, and on average humans fart 14 times a day. That means the average fart has a volume of 2.2 cubic inches (had to do some math — well really, this web page did the math http://www.onlineconversion.com/). I’ve smelled farts that creeped up stair cases, and across gymnasiums, but to be fair, we’ve all smelled farts from across school classrooms, so to detect the human’s ability to detect farts, I needed to determine the volume of a classroom. Figure that the classic high-school classroom is 9′x20′x20′ — that’s 3600 cubic feet, or 6,220,800 cubic inches. To be fair, lets say humans and desks take up 1/3 of the room, and that the volume of room available to fart expansion is 4,000,000 cubic inches. If we divide 2.2 cubic inches of fart by 4,000,000, we find that the human can detect 1 part of fart in 1.8 million parts of air. That’s better than the shark’s ability to sense blood in water.

Granted my math, science, and logic might be off — but my excuse is that I’m drunk. Booya!