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Bad boys bad boys

The Mayor of Philadelphia, in response to a rash of murders in his city, has declared the violence throughout the city a crisis and as a result has ordered the full review of police department policies and has suggested a full moratorium on the issuing of gun permits.

Makes sense..right?
Well..let's see... for the people that are carrying legally, or applying for permits to legally carry have, in most states:

no felony convictions
never been convicted of a druff offense
no mental defects
submitted fingerprints
passed a criminal history background check
paid for mandatory state training
paid the fee for the license

Do you think the bad guys did all that? Do you really think that someone that has gone through the trouble of legally obtaining a license to carry would do it so they could commit murder?

Math is hard..

Ok.. a math problem for you.

If you could take a regular piece of paper and fold it in half, and then in half again, and again... until you've done it 50 times. (I know.. you can only fold a piece of paper in half 7 times... but if you could) How tall would the stack of paper be?

As tall as a ream of paper?
As tall as the Boston phone book?

What's your guess?

What They Said:

BBS says My Guess on 3/21/2005
FBI says The Feds on 3/22/2005
Doug says That�s a whole stack of pages! on 3/25/2005
I have not attempted to calculate the height, but it is equivalent to 562,949,953,421,312 (563 trillion pages, or the height of 1,125,899,906,842.624 reams of paper). The first fold gets you to the thickness of two sheets. After that, you are raising by a power of two 49 more times, so the answer should be 2^49.

I have also read, although never tried it, that no human can fold a sheet of newspaper 8 times, if I am remembering correctly.

3 Comments | Perm-a-link | 3/21/2005