Resonant Constellation

To begin the weirdness, let me direct you towards this link which I found on FARK.com, my favorite online not-news aggregator. It is ostensibly an image of a sculpture of Bernie Madoff being crushed against a wall by a farting bull. I told you it was going to be weird.

When I saw this, I noticed many odd details about the sculpture, not the least of which is the rather impressive…well, for lack of a better phrase, exhaust column. As a physics/astronomy major, my first thought was: Wow! I wonder how much energy that bull would have to produce and how much pressure that would cause on… you get the picture. So I worked it out using basic Newtonian mechanics and some (extremely shoddy) assumptions, and I figured out that the lower limit for the pressure on the…thrust nozzle (this time for lack of a more decent phrase)…would be approximately 2.88 million Pascals. To put that in other terms, that would be roughly 28.5 times atmospheric pressure or approximately 417 pounds per square inch. I did this quick calculation in Wolfram Alpha, which is great for giving alternate units and comparisons. My three favorites were that this pressure is roughly equivalent to the pressure under 300 meters of water, ~0.3 x atmospheric pressure on the surface of Venus (~9 MPa ), or (and this is the best one) ~100 x sound pressure of the Krakatoa explosion at 160 kilometers (~ 20000 Pa ). Remember, this is a lower limit to the pressure. In this case, I think the bull is to be pitied more than Bernie.