On an international export/import website they put of the request, “We [Samda Economy And Trade Inc] are a trading company in Korea and looking for ‘Pork Rectum’ from the United States and will buy 2~3 20 feet containers of that every month.”The Mathematics of Boneless Pork RectumsI teach math and I am always on the look out for interesting problems. It makes an nice exercise to calculate how many rectums it would take to fill those containers. The 20-foot container is a standard size; we have all seen these containers on the highway. They measure 20′ x 8′ x 8.5′ feet. The volume is 1,360 cubic feet.
We only need one more piece of information. The size of the average, deboned, inverted pig’s rectum is two feet long, and 2 inches wide. For the purposes of this calculation, we can assume that the rectum is a parallelepiped, which is to say, a rectangular box of size 2′ x 0.167′ x 0.167′ feet.
A standard rectum thus takes up 0.056 cubic feet. We’ll ignore packing considerations for now and imagine that we’re trying to stuff as many rectums as we can into a container. This calculation, which will represent an upper bound, is easy: we have 1,360 available cubic feet, and each rectums takes up 0.056 cubic feet.
That makes about 25,000 rectums per container. Using the universal principle “one pig, one rectum”, this makes it 25,000 pigs slaughtered per container. Of course, packaging adds bulk, so that the actual number of rectums that can be transported per container must be less. A figure of 20% to 30% increase per rectum seems reasonable. That is, each dry rectum, considering the plastic, dry ice, cardboard, etc., is like 1.2 to 1.3 packaged rectum.
This means that each takes up about 0.067 to 0.072 cubic feet per rectum. That gives us a low of about 18,500 to a high of around 20,000 rectums per container.
Now, those Koreans are importing 2 to 3 of those containers every month. Pick the middle figure. That makes 30 containers a year, just going to this one company. That gives a grand total of between 560,000 to 610,000 rectums per year sailing across the high seas on their way to Korea.
I don't make this stuff up.
But, come to think of it, it does sort of remind me of the economics of turning corn into whiskey as a more efficient (and value-added) way for western farmers of the early 19th century in the United States to ship their produce to market in that time.
This has to demonstrate that shipping Pork Rectums in the way you've illustrated is much more efficient a method than shipping as live pigs.
Interestingly, on a thread in January and earlier tonight, I attempted to decipher from "tons" of contaminated water an actually useful way of picturing the amount of water leaked from the Fukishima melt down. It proved to be less than the capacity of a cargo 747, when transferred from weight to gallons, for example.
And I was never a great lover of, so-called, "word problems," though I boast of maturing enough to recognize their necessity.
Interesting stuff. Thanks!