eBirdseed.com Wild Bird Feeding Blog

Hi,

I was thinking of giving this post the title, Suet and the Lonely City Housewives or Penultimate Fight Club Underneath the Feeders, but that just didn't seem honest. So here we stand, facing the dreaded "Math Beast". Oh, this is going to be worse than a root canal performed by Dr. Yank using a brass band as Novocaine! Let's just get it over with...

• First on our list of terrors is a quick way for most readers to determine how much sunlight they have left towards the end of the day. All you need to do is turn towards the sun, extend your arm fully with your palm facing towards you and the bottom of your pinkie resting on the horizon, and count up the number of fingers until you hit the sun. Each finger represents around 10 minutes of remaining daylight. Obviously, you may have to change this technique depending on where you live, and the size of your hand, but that will at least put you in the ballpark. (Note! Staring at the sun can be harmful... I can't believe that people and their lawyers need these kinds of warnings...)
• This next one is a knee knocker - using your hand to measure distant angles... Extend your arm and hand as above making sure that the bottom of your pinkie is level with your eye. Each finger represents about two degrees of arc. This comes in handy when trying to measure distances...
• And speaking of distances, have you ever wondered how tall a tree was or pondered just how high up a certain bird perched? Yeah, a little bit of the old mean math can give you some idea... Take a look at the masterpiece below...
  

  Here's the skinny... You can roughly determine the height of a tree or whatever using just a tape rule and your tootsies...

  1. Pace off ten or twenty strides and measure the distance. Repeat the process a couple of times. Next take the distance covered by the fixed number of strides and average. There... You now have a respectable tool for approximating significant distance.
  2. Onward... Pace away from the tree until you can hold out a bit of your tape rule such that a fixed length of vertical measure uniformly covers the tree from base to top. In the impressionistic work above, the travel equals 100 feet and the red tape rule reads just 6 inches.
  3. Now, note the distance from your eyes to the tape rule. In the case of our little stick-figure fellow with the long arm this seems to be about 18 inches.
  4. Convert all measurements to the same unit, (in this example feet).
  5. Warm up the theremin, 'cause we're coming down the home stretch! Multiply the size of the red ruler by the paced distance to the tree, and then divide the result by the eye-to-ruler measurement. In this case, that boils down to: (0.5' * 100')/1.5' ... Which equals 33.33' or 33' 4".

There, now that wasn't so bad was it? In fact, common house-hold sundries and a little bit of the not-so-vicious math will let you calculate small weights to a fraction of an ounce, figure diameters to hundredths of an inch, and wrestle warping down to the thousandths. Quite cool actually...

See you by the feeders,

CapeCodAlan

P.S. If you'd care to see the math behind the formula above, email me... Much fun with similar triangles...