Obviously Elisheba's little orange cat Tamerlane, as the World-Conquering Sword of hopelessly spoiled and pampered indoor cats, can defeat 50,000 of his puffballs.
some of Tamerlane's puffballs |
Assume that a typical puffball is 3.5 cm in diameter. We'll assume the puffballs are un-squishable, and, further, we'll assume they are cubical with a side of 3.5cm rather than spherical in order to do a quick and dirty space estimate rather than getting sucked into a minimal packing arrangement problem. With all our simplifying assumptions this becomes an exercise in dimensional analysis:
volume of 1 puffball * convert to meters for easier visualization of space required * number of puffballs (3.5cm)31puffball⋅(1m100cm)3⋅50,000puffballs1
=3.53cm31puffball⋅1m31003cm3⋅50,000puffballs1≈2.1m3
Thus we need 2.1 cubic meters of space for the 50,000 puffballs, or a box 2.11/3≈1.3 meters on a side.
Considering that the puffballs actually squish considerably, we can probably get away with one extra-large moving box from Home Depot and drop Tamerlane in on top to wreak havoc.
"Cry havoc, and let slip the kittens of war!" -William Shakescat
*like the bowmen of Persia, but puffier and significantly less likely to fight back in any way.
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