Old Writings (but fun!)

When I worked at Earlham College (in Richmond IN) as a dorm director (actually 2 dorms) I was asked if I wanted to write a column for the campus paper by one of the students in my building who was the editor. Here is the 1st column I wrote:

Headline: One Billion Jumping Chinese and Other Folly

By: Shannon Salser

Name of Column: Simple Rhyme and Reason

Welcome to an almost new innovation in entertainment. While the idea is not mine, I hope to share my insights of the world with you, the attentive and inquisitive member of the greater Earlham community.

The idea and actually the questions and parts of the answers for this column come from Cecil Adams and his column, titled "The Straight Dope." But in order for this venture to continue, I need your help.

Have you a question that you have often pondered, yet were unable to find an answer for. This is where "Shannon's Simple Rhyme and Reason" will help. Write down your answer (on paper please) and place it in drawer 23. I will then attempt to answer questions each week with the help of my extensive reference staff. Simple, huh?

Q. What would happen if every person in China were to stand on a chair and en mass jump off? Would the resulting blow knock the Earth out of it's orbit?

A. In trying to answer this question, I found out the most important piece of reference hunting knowledge: China will not return voice mail messages! After extensive calls asking if the Peking government would consent to having all 1 billion 27 million people stand on chairs and simultaneously jump off, I determined that the Chinese government was not yet willing to help me for the sake of scientific betterment.

However, as a stab at answering such a staggering question, the U.N. claims that China is still, in the global picture, a poor country. Needless to say, finding over a billion chairs in China is a logistical problem left to the writers of the Clinton Crime Bill. You can just forget finding that many chairs, let alone chairs of a uniform height needed for such a ground-breaking (or is that shaking) experiment.

There are those of you that might suggest taking one person and letting him or her jump off of a chair, measuring the force on the earth and multiplying it by 1 billion 27 million. Even I and my two non-math degrees can figure out that the margin of error in such a study would make it useless and therefore not even worth trying.

But putting aside the logistics for a moment, I figure that even if it were possible to get the Chinese government to return my voice mail messages, Newton's law of equal and opposite forces would save us all from hurtling into the sun by means of a big sweaty blood-curdling roller-coaster ride from hell.

All those chairs with people on them have to exert a force against the ground with the ground exerting just as much force back at the legs of the chairs. So when we have a billion weightless Chinese people for just a fraction of a second, the earth would be moving to join them roughly half way, thus negating the force.

Of course, what if we could materialize (beam them, for those of us who watch Star Trek) all those people onto their chairs and then they jumped. By my calculations (rough, let me tell you), the force would be equal to only 500 tons of TNT. By no means is this enough to move the 6 sextillion 588 quintillion pounds of matter that make up this little old place we call the Earth.

Next week (if I don't get any better questions), regarding the term, "in it deeper than whale shit." How deep is whale shit?