British Petroleum and Lake Minnetonka
This entry was posted on 6/11/2010 7:17 PM and is filed under uncategorized.
Estimate of the oil spilled to date: 63 million gallons. Estimate of water in the Gulf: 643,000,000,000,000,000 gallons. I figured a 1/10,000,000,000 ratio.
1/195,000,000: odds of winning the Powerball jackpot. Comparing the percentage of Deepwater Horizon oil in the Gulf, to the odds of winning the Powerball, I get 6.3 X 10 to the 10th versus 1.95 X 10 to the 8th.
So if you played the Powerball, one ticket at a time, and at same time examined a gallon of water from the gulf, one gallon at a time. You'd be 31 more times likely to win the Powerball than to find that that gallon of water just examined was actually Deepwater Horizon oil.
Doing more calculations about the BP oil spill, I came up with this: Lake Minnetonka is 1.3 X 10 to the 11th power gallons of water. Using the 1/10,000,000,000 ratio from before, we then have 1.3 X 10 to the 1st power gallons of oil in Lake Minnetonka or 13 gallons of oil. This series of connected lakes is a little less than 23 square miles in area. I sure hope I am not off by a factor of 10 or 100.
