(Posted by Patrick Sullivan Jr.)
Have you heard of FreeRice.com? You should have since it's been around over a month. (Heavy sarcasm.)
FreeRice has now donated 1.5 billion grains of rice to the UN World Food Programe...in just 37 days of operations, all thanks to web surfers testing their vocabulary. Talk about a viral marketing program! (And yeah, it's pretty addicting.)
According to my (clumsy?) predictions, they'll have donated 1000 tons of rice (or 4 billion grains, 4 million cups) by Christmas.
My assumptions and calculations:
- There are about 1000 grains of rice in 1 cup. (I asked my wife who works from home to count this out. About 150 grains in, she googled it instead. She's smarter than me, obviously. ;-)
- There are 2 cups in 16 ounces, so 2000 grains = 1 pound.
- So there are 4 million grains in one ton. (2000 grains x 2000 pounds)
- The thick green line is what they've done so far.
- The thin blue line is the trend, brought to you in part by Excel's Chart Trend function, Polynomial type, order 2, for 47 days. (No, I don't know what that means either.)
If you'd like to take this any further (or fix it), download the spreadsheet.
Other interesting rice stuff:
- 11,340,000 tons of rice is grown in the USA. (Source: USA Rice Federation Fact Sheet)
- My favorite rice as of late is Uncle Ben's Original Ready Rice. Plain and simple. Add a little butter when you're eating a piece of steak or fish and it's a great carbohydrate. (This is some of the only MSG-free ready-to-eat rice products as most contain yeast extract, which is MSG.)
- Looking to do some math problems?
(H/T: PCspy)
