Teminal Velocity

The impetus for this post lies with three facts. First, I like to bike to work. Second, Cornell sits on a hill. And finally, I'm not very brave.

As a result of all of these, along with Ithaca's less-than-optimal road maintenance, my semi-daily rides home tend to produce a lot of wear on my brakes as I cruise downhill at what appears to me to be very high speeds. I began to ponder just how high this speed really is, and if I could reduce my use of the brakes or if I'm going to end up using them anyway at the bottom of the hill.

Fishy Calculation

Aaron Santos over at A Diary of Numbers, author of How Many Licks?, has posted a Fermi Contest.

For the uninitiated, a Fermi Problem is a seemingly unanswerable problem, which you can actually estimate reasonable by breaking the problem down into smaller parts. They're really fun, and I intend to post more in the future.

The question at hand is: How far would the oceans sink if we took all the fish out?

I'll answer in two very different ways.