At the beginning of the Russell episode, we mentioned our guest Josh's strange calculations. (See here for lyrics to Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind," whose quantitative questions he answered for us.) Here's a forum thread from geekson.com that features Josh answering such questions as "how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?"
New York State wildlife expert Richard Thomas found that a woodchuck could chuck around 35 cubic feet of dirt in the course of digging a burrow.
A yard of dirt (27 square feet) is about a ton (old landscaping rule of thumb), or 74 lbs. per cubic foot.
This means that, at a minimum, a woodchuck could probably chuck 35*74 = 2590 lbs. of wood.
Depending on what sort of wood you're talking about, this could be anything from {(2590 lbs.)/(4 lbs./cubic foot) = 647.5 cubic feet} (balsa) to {(2590 lbs.)/(83 lbs./cubic foot) = 31.2 cubic feet} (ebony) of wood.
This is, of course, dependent on the woodchuck, its attention span for such tasks, etc. Also, because of the phraseology of the question, almost any answer is acceptable. (The woodchuck COULD decide to fuck off and play foosball, and not chuck any wood at all.) Thus, it's impossible to give an "exactly" answer, merely a good approximation.
If you all have any profound, philosophical questions with quantitative answers, perhaps we can persuade him to answer them here.
-Mark Linsenmayer
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