"Ann in Houston" wrote in message
. com...

[Snip]
The whole point I was trying to make and clarify
for myself is that if you took seven and a half gallon jugs and poured
them
into a container, they would fill a "lot" of space, and that "box" that is
12 inches in each direction didn't seem, in my mind, to be big enough to
hold it all. Does this not resonate with anyone, here? I have had
several
people react in disbelief when they were present as I was working out the
volume of possible pond configurations, and they heard for the first time
how many gallons of water were in a cubic foot.


If I didn't know the conversions between 1 cubic foot and gallons, I bet I
would easily underestimate how many gallons are in 1 cubic foot. Most people
dont have the skills or mental aptitude to look at different shaped volumes
and estimate the the difference in volume. Not to mention, a cubic foot is
not a measurement that most people use on a regular basis, so you don't have
a good mental picture as to what it looks like.

[Snip]

If I knew where to get a water-tight box like that, I would try it, just
to
see. I don't want to go get a bunch of rice or sand. I have plenty of
water. I do appreciate your understanding that this is just a curiosity
issue on my part. I think crash thought I wasn't willing to use the
conversion factor because it was hard for me to picture in my head.

Fill a 1 gallon milk jug with m&m's, do that 5 times, and you'll have a
lifetime supply of m&ms and your answer Around the holidays you can get 3
pound bags of m&ms, they're probably about 1/4 cubic foot.

Can't resist: was each bag of peanuts shaped like a cubic foot? Still,
that's pretty interesting. I wonder what they did before we had foam
peanuts. Rice would be hard to clean out of a car.

The method depends on how important an accurate answer is. Before foam
peanuts, they could have used ping pong balls, tennis balls, baseballs. The
larger the ball, the less accurate your answer is. Shipping rooms buy foam
peanuts by the cubic yard all the time. How accurate the answer is depends
on the application.

Buy a yard of cloth from the fabric store, and the clerk will pull a pull
some cloth over a yard stick, and give you a few inches more. Measure the
clearance of the valves to an engine and you might be concerned with 1/100th
of an inch. Design a circuit on a computer chip, and you're concerned with
micrometer. Draw your company logo using individual atoms on a silicon
crystal using individual atoms and you're probably concerned with nanometers
or smaller.

Snooze