How well do you know popcorn?
 

We recently had a trivia night as a fundraiser (to help out a sick kid), and there was a bunch of food donated from various places. One place donated these huge bags of "movie style" popped popcorn.

Anyway, here's the thing. The amount of popcorn was listed in two forms, ounces and cubic inches. Keep in mind this is a BIG BAG. It said 48 ounces, and _____ cubic inches.

So the question of the day is: How many cubic inches of popped popcorn weighs 48 ounces?

I'll go with 48.

I'm going with 8000 on this one.

Too low, and too high.

5682

6900

High and high

2596

3200

I'll go with 24 cubic inches.

Close enough! 2592

Just seemed like an unusual way of measuring food. So there ya go.

Ha, that is what my answer should have been, I just screwed up the math. I figured the bag was about 2ft tall and had a cylindrical base that had a 1ft diameter. To do the calculation (incorrectly) I just approximated pi to be 3.

In a (very loosely) related note - I pissed-off a buddy of mine recently when we went to a first-showing last Sunday and told him about how, when I worked at a theater the summer before my first year of college, we would bag-up the popcorn at the end of the night and use that to fill the popcorn bin the next morning, since we wouldn't have enough time to pop-up enough fresh popcorn to fill the first popcorn orders of the day.

Didn't stop him from buying popcorn though... :)

Isn't that kind of disappointing? I was thinking wow, 3 lbs of popcorn!! I bet that would fill a room! But it only fills a 1.5 cubic foot box.

http://www.popcorn.org/encyclopedia/industry_facts.cfm
Processors consider the minimum expansion ratio for good popcorn to be 35 to 38 to one. However, some of today's improved hybrids will expand over 40 times

Ahhh... my venerable ancestors of the pre-micro age. Some good work they did back in their day.

I initially read that as professors. I wish I could be a popcorn professor.

Is this thread still alive? DIE, THREAD, DIE!!!

I need to buy me some Jiffy Pop. I loved making that when I was a kid.

.................

Mmmm exploding ass.