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Cake day: March 17th, 2024

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  • I can’t necessarily offer an answer here, but I can give you a bound at least. I was able to find this 1703 geography of the Kingdom of Naples that explicitly calls Italy a boot, so “some time before 1703” can be said for sure

    Forma una Penisola, à guisa di uno Stivale, fi come l’Italia tutta fù meditata da Strabone, e da altri Geografi di rigo

    Machine translated:

    It forms a peninsula, like a boot, just as all of Italy was studied by Strabo and other renowned geographers.

    I’m fairly sure the Strabo bit means “we’ve known it was this shape since Strabo” rather than “Strabo said it was boot-shaped”

    To speculate a little more, I think the style of boot that Italy looks like started off as riding shoes developed in 10th century Iran (heels are good for staying in stirrups, apparently). If that is correct then it can’t be earlier than the 10th century since there weren’t boots that Italy looked like













  • Blues and rock are my comfort zones, and I can happily get along with most genres of jazz and metal that aren’t ultra-technical. I can do some passable funk

    Guitar is what I’m best at, I’m decent on bass, and I’m complete dogshit on keyboard but working to change that situation. I technically also own a little reed flute that I bought from a whittler at a winter solstice festival that I know how to play the Shrek theme and Darude’s Sandstorm on








  • I think that this is more or less the approach I would take, but you shouldn’t worry about the actual diameter of anything. It’s not important, after all - if everything was scaled up twice as big, the answer would be the same. Just call the diameter of the cup a nice round number and then see how the hazelnuts compare to it. In this case I think there’s about five hazelnut widths to the glass, so I’m gonna call the glass diameter 50, the nuts 10, and the glass height 80.

    You’ll need to change your formulae, though. pi*d is the circumference of a circle, but we need the area here, so pi*r*r (and then multiply by height for volume). That gives me 157,050 whateverunits cubed for the volume of the cup. For a sphere it’s (4/3)*pi*r*r*r, so 524 for the hazelnuts. Now, I know that spheres don’t pack perfectly into a volume, but I don’t remember the factor even for optimal packing, so I’m just gonna take a wild guess and say that 70% of the internal volume of the cup is actually occupied by hazelnuts. That gives me… 209 hazelnuts in the cup. Which seems worse than your answer on a gut level, but I can count 86 visible ones so it’s maybe actually not bad

    Checking my results

    Hah, I was way off too