Recent Calculations

Latest calculations from the blog - Page 3

400 Francs Alive, $82.5 Million Dead — What Was Van Gogh's Painting Actually Worth?
Money & Economy · Society & Law

400 Francs Alive, $82.5 Million Dead — What Was Van Gogh's Painting Actually Worth?

Van Gogh sold exactly one painting in his lifetime — The Red Vineyard, for 400 francs. A century later, Portrait of Dr. Gachet sold at Christie's for $82.5 million. Three conversion methods (gold standard, CPI, wage-indexed) put 400 francs somewhere between $3,300 and $11,600 in today's money, a 3.5× spread that is itself the point. The tragedy multiplier runs from 7,100× to 60,000×. Then the counterexample arrives: Picasso died with ~$750M, and Damien Hirst grossed $200M from a single auction — while still alive.

#Van Gogh#starving artist myth#art valuation#art price history#gold standard conversion#economic history
Can You Watch Every Movie Ever Made Before You Die? And How Much Popcorn Would It Take?
Cosmic & Scale · Everyday Life

Can You Watch Every Movie Ever Made Before You Die? And How Much Popcorn Would It Take?

With 800,000 theatrical films in existence and 6,000 more arriving every year, even a lifelong 16-hour-a-day viewer reaches only 15.5% of the catalog — and immortality tops out at 58%. We run the numbers across three film-count scenarios and calculate exactly how many corn kernels the popcorn bill comes to.

#movie#time#Fermi estimation#popcorn#corn kernel#lifetime
You Are Literally What You Eat — Half of You Renews in Three Weeks, the Rest Takes Decades
Body & Health · Everyday Life

You Are Literally What You Eat — Half of You Renews in Three Weeks, the Rest Takes Decades

50% of your body swaps to new material in about three weeks — mostly water and blood. Reaching 90% takes 10–18 years, because muscle and bone are slow. An exponential tissue-renewal model calculates the timeline tissue by tissue, then counts the burgers. The non-renewable 2.8% (neurons, cardiac muscle, ocular lens) stays original forever.

#cell turnover#body renewal#neurons#body composition#water turnover#7-year myth
How Big Would Heaven Need to Be? A Population Geometry Thought Experiment
Cosmic & Scale · Everyday Life

How Big Would Heaven Need to Be? A Population Geometry Thought Experiment

Roughly 109 billion humans have ever lived and died. If every one of them entered heaven, how large would it need to be? We treat floor area per soul as the key variable, calculate heaven's required footprint under three admission-rate scenarios, and compare the result against Earth's surface area and the specific dimensions Revelation 21 gives for the New Jerusalem — then ask what happens when you add the animals.

#heaven#human history#cumulative population#religion#scale#Fermi estimation
How Much Would the Great Pyramid Cost to Build Today? Three Scenarios — and the Real Measure of Pharaonic Power
Money & Economy · Society & Law

How Much Would the Great Pyramid Cost to Build Today? Three Scenarios — and the Real Measure of Pharaonic Power

Three parallel calculations on what the Great Pyramid would cost in today's money: modern heavy equipment runs ~$1.5B; ancient hand-quarrying at global construction wages runs ~$22B; the grain rations Khufu actually paid convert to as little as $253M. But how much he 'underpaid' swings from 1× to 87× depending on how you value ancient labor — and the figure that doesn't move is the real measure of his power: locking 2.75% of the workforce onto one building for a generation.

#pyramid#construction cost#ancient Egypt#labor mobilization#economics#megaproject