Tuesday, October 7, 2014

Cheetos Bag o' Bones - Distribution and Relative Possibilitie

Investigation--how many complete cheetah skeletons can I make with a bag of Cheetos Bag o' Bones?

Materials: One 8-oz bag Cheetos Bag o’ Bones
Large bowl
Smaller containers for sorting the bones

Sorting revealed the following distribution:
Skulls: 54
Ribcages: 38
Paws: 51
Longbones: 82

Considering the picture above, a cheetah skeleton is one head, one rib cage, four paws, and four long bones--the limiting factor on skeletal assembly would be paws. This one bag of Cheetos Bag O’ Bones could assemble 12 complete cheetahs.

Another picture on the bag, though,  shows one head, one rib cage, four paws, and eight long bones. In that case, the limiting factor would be longbones, and the bag would only give us 10 complete cheetahs.

I could purchase more bags, but it turns out that the bones are the puffy kind of cheeto, not the crunchy ones I prefer.

So I’ll stick with the observation that the total volume of each kind of bone seemed to be approximately equal.  It’s also possible that bags are filled by mass of each bone, but my instrumentation was limited.  (My kitchen scale has been dropped enough times that its accuracy is unreliable. It's sensitivity with such light objects has never been stellar, either.)

No comments:

Post a Comment