November 05, 2004
I did this once. In high school, a group of us went to an apple orchard and the to someone's home to make pie. Lots of pies. How many apples do we need to make a pie, though? We had a recipe that told us how many pounds of apples to use per pie, but we didn't have a kitchen scale. Science to the rescue! Tony & I went off to a corner to work it out. We have two identical mixing bowls, so we'll just build a makeshift scale, balancing a bowl of water with a bowl of apples. We know the molecular weight of water so can calculate the weight of a given volume… Several calculations later, we — er, that's not right. See, you forgot this. Oh, there you go. We'll need 254 bushels of apples per pie!
Once we'd arrived at this half-assed conclusion, we turned around to face our friends' bemused smiles and several filled pie shells. "Just keep adding apples until it's full," Kiara said, not quite able to hold back gales of laughter.
I swear, that's why I married her.
