It’s late afternoon, the grant writing is going nowhere so I decided to have some fun with Google and a calculator.

Between 1976 and 2006, the mortgage on the Olympic installations will have cost us $2 billions, the majority of which is paid through a fraction of the provincial cigarette tax. In 2003, that fraction was 17.42% of a $1.20 tax taken from the cost of each pack of cigarettes. At $0.21 per pack, that means that we needed to smoke the content of more than 9 billion packs (9,523,809,524 to be precise or almost 1500 for each Quebecois).

I was wondering if that was enough to fill up the inside of the stadium. One of my labmate is a smoker so I determined the dimensions of her cigarette pack to be 7.5 x 10.5 x 1.8 cm…you can thus fit 7,054 of them in a cubic meter and 9 billion packs will take up about 1,350,000 cubic meters.

That’s sounds like a lot but, “unfortunately” the Big O is BIG…1,869,158 cubic meters. It would only be 72% full.

I wonder how it would turn out if I used pennies instead?

P.S. You’d have to admire the dedication of my lab, three of them were in a middle of a scientific/technical discussion when their non-smoking boss walked in the office while carrying a ruler, measured the pack of cigarettes that was lying on a desk and left without a word. The discussion continued uninterrupted as if that was completely normal.

Related posts:

1. “The Big Owe” Finally Paid For
2. I hate grocery plastic bags!
3. If they are good enough for the Olympic committee…
4. Canadian Medals from the 2006 Torino Olympic Games
5. More numbers