The following story illustrates how no question is so dumb as to prevent us from finding the answer, for entertainment if nothing else. In fact, we often take these kinds of things as a challenge. High school freshmen Elodie Yerich baked bread during a YMCA camping trip near a lake last summer. Her musings turned into a question submitted to the Minneapolis Star Tribune during the state fair. How much flour would be required to turn Lake Superior into a loaf of bread?
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To find the answer, the paper turned to the bakers at Duluth’s Best Bread. The bakery is owned by Michael Lillegard, a baker who has a graduate degree in math, and his brother Robert Lillegard. The math was the easy part, although the amount of flour required is exponentially more than the earth provides. The actual baking of the hypothetical loaf of bread would be even more difficult. One way to bake it would be to dig five miles into the earth to use heat emanating from its core. But that comes with its own problems. Read about the theoretical lake-sized loaf of bread at the Star Tribune. And then read the thread at Metafilter, where amusingly overthinking a hypothetical situation is a time-honored tradition.
(Altered bread image credit: Dmitry Makeev, lake image: NASA)
Source: neatorama