https://chadtopaz.com/essays/fireworks-per-second
"This Saturday night, the capstone of America’s 250th birthday celebration on
the National Mall will close with what its organizers bill as the largest
fireworks display in history: 850,000 shells launched from ten sites — the
Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, eight barges anchored in the Potomac, and
West Potomac Park — in a show running approximately 40 minutes. Meanwhile,
The
Washington Post reported this week that the National Park Service’s own
internal modeling expects the show to produce hazardous air pollution around
the Mall and “very unhealthy” conditions across downtown D.C., Arlington, and
Capitol Hill.
I will get to the smoke. But I am a mathematician and data scientist, and when
a press release hands me a number like 850,000, professional habit takes over.
I divide.
Eight hundred fifty thousand fireworks in 40 minutes is 21,250 fireworks per
minute. It is 354 fireworks per second. It is one firework, on average, every
2.8 milliseconds, sustained for two-thirds of an hour. At the average rate, ten
seconds of this show contains roughly 3,500 fireworks — a respectable grand
finale for a midsized American city, repeated 240 times in a row.
Rates like this are hard to grasp until you put them next to the human body, so
let me try. Harvard’s BioNumbers database puts a typical blink at 0.1 to 0.4
seconds. Every time you blink on Saturday night, you will miss between 35 and
142 fireworks. Film the show on your phone at a standard 24 frames per second,
and each frame will capture about 15 fireworks you have not yet seen; at 60
frames per second, six. And if the launches were spaced perfectly evenly, the
firing rate would no longer be in the realm of countable rhythm; it would be in
the realm of pitch. The F above middle C vibrates at about 349 cycles per
second. The show averages 354 events per second. Nobody on the Mall will
experience this as fireworks going off one after another in any ordinary human
sense.
The physics of sound arrives at the same place. The National Weather Service
teaches the rule of thumb that thunder takes about five seconds to travel a
mile. In the 2.8 milliseconds between this show’s average launches, sound
travels roughly three feet. With ten launch sites strung along a couple of
miles of Mall and river, each throwing its own overlapping impulses, the
arrivals will not land as distinguishable booms. They will smear into a
continuous roar with no silence inside it."
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
