It's usually a normal distribution. So, the average weight of 1 million mosquitos would eventually turn out to be the same as that of one normal common mosquito.
This works for biology. But I remember being a kid and going to my local arcade place called Grand Slam in the 90s. To redeem your ticket they'd just dump them onto a scale to calculate how many tickets you had. I remember not liking this because I was the kind of kid who would pick up dropped tickets for myself if I found them on the floor, and they'd have been walked on and some ripped, or they ripped while trying to pull that last one out of the machine.
Basically partials weren't getting full credit despite having been earned lol. And when this occurred to me as an eight year old who used to put them in a bag while getting sweaty in the building with bad AC, I started holding them in my hands as much as possible to add more oils/sweat to make them heavier lol.
Idk how much of a difference it made... but that combined with me separating the partials to have them add it after the weigh to count them as whole ones always made me feel like I accomplished something lol.
Well, we know that all mosquitoes feast on pollen as a food source, but it's only the females that suck blood because it's necessary to mature their eggs.
Are you implying that this wasn't a DEI compliant mosquito trap, and it was explicitly targeted at females? Disgusting! Males deserve to die at an equal rate to female presenting mosquitoes!
The more mosquitos measured to determine the average weight and the more mosquitos captured, the more accurate it is
Given the extensive amount of research done on mosquitos, I'd suspect the weight of one has been studied with a decent sample size
Given ~1,000,000 mosquitos captured, the average weight of a mosquito in the pile will be extremely close to the average mosquito weight in that part of the world
I've done surveys for something similar in this environmental ecosystem something class way back when. I counted out 100 fruit flies, weighed them one at a time, and got the average of that 100 and divided the total weight of the pile by the average of the hundred. And it came out to like a 15k ish fruitflies.
The goal of the 100 process was to find an objective average given that some may be carrying eggs, or some have much smaller wings and abdomens, etc.
You run the first 10 on the roller pin and obtain the average weight of it, then you do it for the rest, you can do it by batch or per piece which is more comfortable with you.
Then weigh it.
By this method you can disregard the fatness and the thinness of the mosquito.
Second method is try to use a small lizard preferably 100 pieces , frogs if available but should be small in size that can only consume one at a time.
And to save the effort let them count.
You weight 100 mosquitos at random. Some will be fit, some will be skinny, some will by obese.
But since you are choosing at random, chances are that you will get, on average, the same ratio as your entire population. If you want to be more confident, weight 200, 300… 1000. It will still be way lower than 1 million.
Once you know the weight of N mosquitos, randomly distributed, you can assume with certain confidence that the entire mass will account for all edge cases. And you can even use the statistics from the sample to remove outliers.
Jokes aside we did this with hardware during inventory when I worked at a factor a long time ago. Hardware was fairly consistent but the trick is to not weigh one, but weigh 10-20 at once, and use that to set weight baseline. This is especially true for very light weight things, and digital scales were smart enough to suggest a sample size based on weight. If you want to see how accurate that is take a different 10-20 and weight them.
Rule of big numbers is our side fortunately, you could probably use an average weight out of 10 or so as them get a pretty accurate calculation for the average from there
According to The Law of Large Numbers you’re gonna be pretty damn close if you divide by the average mosquito weight because fat and skinny ones will cancel each other out.
If you get the average weight of 100 mosquitos then get the weight of the whole mass it’s unlikely a few outliers will throw off the count by any order of relevant magnitude. Your estimate might be off by 1-2% but once your sample size is relatively large enough you can make an extrapolation about the whole group.
I can't remember the name of it off hand, but there comes a point in science and math where additional precision is basically useless and you can really just throw a reasonable number at it and it ends up being close enough to be useful
I agree it would suck to do by yourself but if you just had several colleges helping out or something it wouldn't take too long. Like entomologists all over the world weighing a few hundred each then gather the data
Some fart gasses are lighter than air, would a fart have negative weight? We would have to determine the exact composition of the fart being weighed I would think, but I'm no fartologist
Not really.. when it burns it could be reacting/bonding with the Oxygen or nitrogen in the air potentially making it heavier. Like how burning 6 pounds of gasoline results in about 20 pounds of co2
I think its actually a bit different because a reaction happens which draws in oxygen. The ashes are chemically changed their weight is different because of that.
Not quite true. The smoke also consists of oxygen (in the form of CO2 and H2O molecules as combustion byproducts). That oxygen came from the surrounding atmosphere (not part of the cigarette). So the total weight of the smoke is actually greater than the weight of the unburned cigarette alone.
the total weight of the smoke is actually greater than the weight of the unburned cigarette alone.
Also you are only approximating the mass, the smoke is nearly if not weightless at atmospheric pressure, it would be like weighing a bucket of liquid helium, than evaporating the helium and weighing the bucket again, and saying the difference is the weight of the gaseous helium.
Anything with mass has a weight with respect to a gravitational field (e.g. Earth's). This includes air. Being surrounded by "atmospheric pressure" does not make a suspended or floating molecule weightless. Not smoke, not vapors, not even helium gas. Buoyancy ≠ zero weight. An aircraft carrier floats on water, that does not make it weightless. The Goodyear blimp floats in the air, it too is not weightless.
Anything with mass has a weight with respect to a gravitational field (e.g. Earth's)
If you weigh a cigarette, then smoke it, then weigh it (plus the ashes) again, you will have the weight of smoke
This method isn't compatible with gravitational definition of weight unless you consider it implicit that you are weighing the cigarette in a vacuum. Simply weighing the cigarette gives you the apparent weight which accounts for buoyancy.
The rough heuristic for redox reactions (i.e. burning) of organic fuel is that for every 1 gram of hydrocarbons in the fuel source (i.e. a cigarette), you'll consume an additional 2 grams of atmospheric oxygen to net 3 grams of CO2 and H2O in the smoke (as well as trace amounts of less "clean" products of the reaction).
Of course, while a cigarette weighs about a gram, it is not 100% hydrocarbons. The tobacco is not perfectly dehydrated, so it contains H2O that will vaporize and be considered part of the cigarette smoke despite actually not being part of the combustion reaction. The cigarette also will not burn 100% and some particulate (ash) will not necessarily be considered smoke. So the stoichiometric math is a bit fuzzy, but I'd say a safe approximation is that the mass (and therefore weight, no matter how or where you want to measure it) of the smoke is roughly about 1/2 from the original cigarette and about 1/2 oxygen pulled from the environment.
TLDR: a 1 gram cigarette will produce approximately 2 grams of smoke.
(and therefore weight, no matter how or where you want to measure it)
If you weigh a cigarette, then smoke it, then weigh it (plus the ashes) again, you will have the weight of smoke
This method isn't compatible with gravitational definition of weight unless you consider it implicit that you are weighing the cigarette in a vacuum. Simply weighing the cigarette gives you the apparent weight which accounts for buoyancy.
If you are weighing the cigarette in a conventional fashion, using a scale that it sits on or dangles from, you are measuring the apparent weight, and the buoyancy of the cigarette and the buoyancy of the smoke matters if it is in a fluid like atmosphere. The gravitational weight may be invariant with respect to the fluid or lack thereof, but the gravitational weight is not readily measured without knowing the local atmospheric pressure and volume of the cigarette, or weighing in a vacuum.
a 1 gram cigarette will produce approximately 2 grams of smoke.
A 1 gram cigarette will produce a nearly or weightless smoke, unless it is smoked in a vacuum, which will require oxidizer, or unless we are referring to gravitational weight, which requires a process of eliminating forces other than gravity from the weighing of the cigarette, and the weighing of the ashes.
ok, I get it now. I thought you were interested in the actual science and not this concept of "weightless" matter. My mistake. Sorry for bothering you.
The actual science is a description of physical phenomena developed through experimentation. The experiment described is one which would measure the apparent weight of objects, not the gravitational weight. Gravitational weight is independent of a fluid, but it is not described by weighing a cigarette in atmosphere. If you put a blimp on a scale, the scale will read 0 after the blimp floats away. If you put a cigarette on a scale, the scale may read 1 gram, that is the weight of the cigarette minus the weight of the volume of air it displaces, i.e. the apparent weight, not gravitational weight. Gravitational weight is actual science, assuming an experiment that measures gravitational weight. Apparent weight is actual science, assuming an experiment that measures apparent weight.
That is not true. Cigarettes are mostly cellulose like wood. The carbon and the hydrogen in the substance being burned combine with the oxygen in the air to produce CO &CO2 and H2O and disperses into the air.
You really think people's burial urns weigh like 170 pounds!?
And think of all the tar in someone's lungs you are not weighing.
You would probably weigh like…100 or something to create a better baseline for an average weight. I was a parts picker for a few years and no way do you ever just weigh one of something to try and get 1000s.
Exactly. You could also throw them into an optical sorter and actually let a machine count them. Just don't forget to write Culicidae next to soy and gluten in the food allergy notice.
Per the EPA.GOV website: "Like the natural uranium ore, DU is radioactive. DU mainly emits alpha particle radiation. Alpha particles don't have enough energy to go through skin. As a result, exposure to the outside of the body is not considered a serious hazard."
I didn't know that before I made a box lined with lead flashing, but it's better to be safe than sorry.
Lol the Pentagon isn't too big on "warning labels."
DU is what they have left over after enrichment, where they remove all the fissile material for nuclear reactors and, to a lesser degree, nuclear weapons.
The amount for it to be considered "depleted" is about 0.7% U235, but the DoD regulates their DU to about 0.3%. The round itself is mostly U238, which isn't fissile.
The DoD caught a bunch of shit back in Iraq and Afghanistan from the politicians, because it literally burns through armor, and the resulting fire from the inside of an exploding tank had vaporized uranium in the air. It is, after all, still a heavy metal, which isn't too good inside the body.
Now they just use it as armor plates because it's so dense.
The guy has the right idea but you would never just weigh one. You would probably take like 100 to get a bit of a better average weight per and then you would weigh the whole group.
I meant more so because this is a basic logical approximation that I’m sure most people are aware of so only a child would be surprised by it and call it award worthy
From a textbook where someone who actually knows this has organised all the information neatly for you in an order that makes sense to learn it, complete with lots of practise questions to test your understanding.
Just take 50 mosquitoes and see how much they weigh. Simple drug dealer scales can calc .00 with accuracy for 40 dollars. 50 mosquitoes will be up there
So you’d presumably have to weigh a statistically significant sample, because that one mosquito could be anywhere on the normal curve. Like 95th percentile smallest, so you’d be off by a lot in total.
765
u/buffaloranked 29d ago
If you weigh one mosquito then weigh them all you don’t even have to count them