Month: February 2013

How healthy is it, in the long run, to bike places instead of driving?

I began biking regularly in the latter half of 2006. How much have these past six years of biking helped my life?

For all this time, I’ve averaged about 20 miles a week, the typical length of my commute to school or work. Many weeks of inactivity have been roughly balanced out by a lot weeks of 70 or 100 miles.

So I’ve biked about 20 * 50 * 6 = 6000 miles in six years. That’s just three miles a day, a pittance, but sustained over a long time.

Using this calorie counter for bikes, with my average weight during this time (about 250 lbs), 10 mph average speed, no elevation change, 80% flat ground, 10% uphill, 10% downhill (conservative estimates for sure!), and 6000 miles, I get 475,305 calories.

At 3500 calories a pound, that’s 135 pounds that I could have otherwise gained.

I weight 273 lbs. Even at six feet tall, that makes me a very large man! If I had gained all those calories, I would weigh 408 lbs. At that size, my risk factors for diabetes and heart disease would be huge.

 

 

This isn’t even considering the downstream effects (more muscle, thus even more automatic weight loss) of having biked those miles, nor the roughly $600 in gasoline I would have otherwise spent*, nor the general therapeutic benefits to my happiness.

My bicycles have saved my life. We’re not done yet (273 lbs is a long, long way off from the good), but I’m glad to know I got something done.

 

 

*Okay, maybe more like $400, taking out a lot of the fun rides.

How big is big? Many of my friends in technology like to talk about big scale. Programmers at big companies work on big projects which have billions of transactions a day, on tens of thousands of computers. We talk about these things like they’re really big. They’re really big, aren’t they?

Are they?

I wanted to try to gain a better intuition about big, and maybe to bust my pride a little bit, so I asked myself:

Which is bigger? A mountain, or all the Google searches ever, if each search was worth one bean?

What?

Well, a Google search is a little thing, but not insignificant. A lot of beans (or a lot of Google searches) should really add up.

So I wanted to know: if we’d been throwing a bean on a pile each time someone made a Google search, would we have a pile that was comparable in size to a mountain?

 

 

Here’s a page with some of Google’s yearly search totals. Google had something like 1.7 trillion searches in all of 2011. I think 12 trillion is a safe estimate for all the Google searches ever. It’s almost certainly within a factor of two (ie, somewhere between 6 and 24 trillion).

 

 

A bean is something like 1.5 cm³.

So, a bean per Google search means about 18 trillion cm³. Let’s convert that to km³. That pile is 0.018 km³.

Mount Fuji is 336 km³.

 

 

Mount Fuji is eighteen thousand times larger than the bean pile for all the Google searches ever. Even if Google grew ten times larger, it would take us eighteen thousand more years of bean piling to stack up to Mount Fuji (and Mount Fuji isn’t the largest mountain on Earth. Not even close).

It might even be the case that Mount Fuji is larger in volume than all the beans the human species has ever eaten in all history. I don’t know.

Go Nature!