Ulog 59: Pumpkin obsession

I’ve been obsessed the past few days. What is it you ask? At my work place in the cafeteria, there lays a giant pumpkin. And a sign that reads “Guess the weight of this pumpkin and win a basket of goodies.”

I personally don’t care for the basket of goodies. I am, however, quite motivated to the task of trying to guess the weight of this giant pumpkin. I am going to try to do it with some technology and a little of possible “cheating”.

I searched the Internet to find out if anyone has figured out how to guess the weight of an object without using a scale. Interestingly, there are people who have written academic papers on triangulating the weight of pumpkins.

There are a few ways of doing it. You can try to figure out the circumference of the pumpkin and then match it up against the sheet. The second method and supposedly the more accurate method would be to measure the circumference and add it with the side-to-side and end-to-end measurement. This method is called the “over-the-top”.

I have been trying over the past few days to get the necessary data to compute the weight using the found methodology. The issue that I have is that I can’t be taking a tape measure and figuring those measurements out. Plus, I don’t have a measuring tape with me. Luckily someone smart has come up with a solution. There is an app called “Measure” that uses the phone camera to figure out the distance between two lines. I used the app to test out a few points to see how accurate it is and the answer came out pretty right on point. I used the app to measure the tile and it came out exactly as “12 inches”. So I think the app is fairly accurate.

I took my iPhone downstairs and took a few measurements. It said the circumference of the pumpkin is 25.5 inches. I came up with 23 and 24 inches for the other points. According to the sheet online, it said that the pumpkin weight 250 lbs. I don’t think the pumpkin looks like 250 pounds. Using the circumference alone, it said that the pumpkin was 150 pounds. That was what I wrote down. When I learn math better, I will use some of these crazier formulas.

For now, I can’t wait to see what’s the real weight of this pumpkin.

Image source: Pixabay Mobile App - no link provided.