![\"i-6cc855b80ae87e3cb5ab039cdf6b8855-spherical_baby.jpg\"](\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/467\/files\/2012\/04\/i-6cc855b80ae87e3cb5ab039cdf6b8855-spherical_baby.jpg\")
<\/p>\nWelcome to today’s exciting episode of “How Big a Dork Am I?” Today, we’ll be discussing the making of unnecessary models:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In this graph, the blue points represent the average mass in grams<\/a> of a fetus at a given week of gestation, while the red line is the mass predicted by a simple model treating the fetus as a sphere of uniform density with a linearly increasing radius.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The “model” was set up by taking the 40-week length reported at BabyCenter, and dividing by two to get an approximate radius for the spherical baby. Then I assumed that the actual radius increased linearly from zero to the final value, calculated the volume of the sphere, and multiplied by a constant density to get reasonable agreement between the model and the data.<\/p>\n If you take the numbers I put into this, and use them to estimate the mass of a cell in this model baby, you find that a cell with a volume of one cubic micron (10-18<\/sup> m3<\/sup>) would have a mass of about 50 femtograms, which is kind of low, but remarkably good for such a silly model.<\/p>\n Oh, the things I will do to amuse myself…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Welcome to today’s exciting episode of “How Big a Dork Am I?” Today, we’ll be discussing the making of unnecessary models: In this graph, the blue points represent the average mass in grams of a fetus at a given week of gestation, while the red line is the mass predicted by a simple model treating… Continue reading Assume a Spherical FutureBaby…<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[74,72,45,11,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-futurebaby","category-life_science","category-medicine","category-science","category-silliness","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2629"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2629\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}