Anyway, according to wikipedia, your keyboard is likely mostly made of
> Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS). "Production of 1 kg of ABS requires
> the equivalent of about 2 kg of oil for raw materials and energy"
>
> Let's assume your keyboard weighs 1.5kg and that your hummer goes 12 miles
> per gallon. Roughly 19.5 gallons of gazoline can be refined from 42
> gallons of crude (that's a barrel). The density of Texan crude oil is
> 0.873 kg/L. There are 3.78 liters in a gallon.
Putting it all together:
>
> 1.5 * 2 / 0.873 / 3.78 = 0.91 gallons of crude to make the keyboard,
> that's
> 0.91 * 19.5 / 42 * 12 = 5.06 miles (8.1km) driving the hummer.
>
> It looks even tinier than I expected, someone might want to doublecheck
> the computation.
Assuming the data is correct: 42 gal crude/bbl crude * 3.78 L/gal * 0.873 kg/L * 1 kg ABS/2 kg crude * 1 kbd / 1.5 kg ABS = 46.2 kbd/bbl crude 19.5 gal gas/bbl crude * 12 hum mi/gal gas = 234 hum mi / bbl crude (234 hum mi / bbl crude) / (46.2 kbd / bbl crude) = 5.06 hum mi / kbd
Looks correct. Actually, to my completely uneducated eyes, that's a long way to tote a Hummer. I'm surprised it wasn't less. Making plastic is expensive -- though I guess I don't have to buy and throw away four keyboards a day (which would about cover the mileage of my commute).
-- John S Costello joxn.costello at gmail.com "Cargo cults are a faith-based religion and have no evidence for their beliefs. The only reason their religion seems silly to Westerners is that we happen to know the non-supernatural cause that started their religion. Basically they believe some dude was here, now he's gone, but soon he's coming back to save everyone. It's times like these when I tend to think Ann Coulter is absolutely fucking brilliant. I wish I could make a bunch of Christians mock a faith that believes in the imminent return of a once-living savior." -- Amanda Marcotte -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20060728/18513651/attachment.htm>