Surface Area Quotes & Sayings

If a surface can be seen as a kind of channel through which information flows from one region of space to another, then the area of the surface is a measure of its capacity to transmit information. This is very suggestive. — Lee Smolin

By making the surface highly crenellated and wiggly we can make the area enclosing a given volume larger and larger. This is a winning strategy that living systems have adapted to exploit. — Anonymous

Of the total surface area of Earth, Britain occupies just 0.0174069 per cent. — Bill Bryson

Remember my experiments with the RTG and having a hot bath? Same principle, but I came up with an improvement: submerge the RTG. No heat will be wasted that way. I started with a large rigid sample container (or "plastic box" to people who don't work at NASA). I ran a tube through the open top and down the inside wall. Then I coiled it in the bottom to make a spiral. I glued it in place like that and sealed the end. Using my smallest drill bit, I put dozens of little holes in the coil. The idea is for the freezing return air from the regulator to pass through the water as a bunch of little bubbles. The increased surface area will get the heat into the air better. Then I got a medium flexible sample container ("Ziploc bag") and tried to seal the RTG in it. But the RTG has an irregular shape, and I couldn't get all the air out of the bag. I can't allow any air in there. — Andy Weir

People actually occupy around 3 per cent of the earth's land surface. If 1,200 square feet was given to every person in the world, they would still all fit into an area the size of Texas - whether the Texans would object is an altogether different issue! — Michael Coren

The Pacific, greatest of oceans, has an area exceeding that of all dry land on the planet. Herman Melville called it "the tide-beating heart of earth." Covering more than a third of the planet's surface
as much as the Atlantic, Indian, and Arctic oceans combined
it's the largest geographical feature in the world. Its awesome 165,384,000 square km (up to 16,000 km wide and 11,000 km long) have an average depth of around 4,000 meters. Half the world's liquid water is stored here. You could drop the entire dry landmass of our planet into the Pacific and still have room for another continent the size of Asia. One theory claims the moon may have been flung from the Pacific while the world was still young. — David Stanley

The gut has not only a remarkable system of nerves to gather all this information, but also a huge surface area. That makes it the body's largest sensory organ. Eyes, ears, nose, or the skin pale by comparison. The information they gather is received by the conscious mind and used to formulate a response to our environment. They can be seen as life's parking sensors. The gut, by contrast, is a huge matrix, sensing our inner life and working on the subconscious mind. — Giulia Enders

Loss creates a greater overall surface area within a person. You expand as a result of it. Though it may very well feel like the opposite. — Augusten Burroughs

Two observations take us across the finish line. The Second Law ensures that entropy increases throughout the entire process, and so the information hidden within the hard drives, Kindles, old-fashioned paper books, and everything else you packed into the region is less than that hidden in the black hole. From the results of Bekenstein and Hawking, we know that the black hole's hidden information content is given by the area of its event horizon. Moreover, because you were careful not to overspill the original region of space, the black hole's event horizon coincides with the region's boundary, so the black hole's entropy equals the area of this surrounding surface. We thus learn an important lesson. The amount of information contained within a region of space, stored in any objects of any design, is always less than the area of the surface that surrounds the region (measured in square Planck units). — Brian Greene

Wall and Melzack showed how a chronic injury not only makes the cells in the pain system fire more easily but can also cause our pain maps to enlarge their "receptive field" (the area of the body's surface that they map for), so that we begin to feel pain over a larger area of our body's surface. This was happening to Moskowitz, whose neck pain was spreading to both sides of his neck. Wall and Melzack also showed that as maps enlarge, pain signals in one map can "spill" into adjacent pain maps. Then we may develop referred pain, when we are hurt in one body part but feel the pain in another, some distance away. — Norman Doidge

Food production has affected the environment more than any other activity humans have engaged in. Humanity devotes more land to food production than anything else - roughly a third of the surface area of the earth, much of which was once forest but has been converted by humans into farms or grazing lands. — Ramez Naam

With wok cooking, you chop things up into little pieces for maximum surface area, so they can cook in minutes, if not seconds. Sauteing is energy efficient; baking is not. — Jennifer Lee

I definitely rediscovered reading for pleasure by devoting such a large swath of my time to sitting on airplanes. I am now painfully adept at removing my shoes so as to have the least amount of foot surface area touching an airport floor. — Sloane Crosley

I myself have dreamed up a structure intermediate between Dyson spheres and planets. Build a ring 93 million miles in radius - one Earth orbit - around the sun. If we have the mass of Jupiter to work with, and if we make it a thousand miles wide, we get a thickness of about a thousand feet for the base.
And it has advantages. The Ringworld will be much sturdier than a Dyson sphere. We can spin it on its axis for gravity. A rotation speed of 770 m/s will give us a gravity of one Earth normal. We wouldn't even need to roof it over. Place walls one thousand miles high at each edge, facing the sun. Very little air will leak over the edges.
Lord knows the thing is roomy enough. With three million times the surface area of the Earth, it will be some time before anyone complains of the crowding. — Larry Niven

This is the outer surface of the brain where much of our thinking is done. Unfolded, this surface layer would cover the area of a football field — James Tagg

Redwoods have an enormous surface area that extends upward into space because they have a propensity to do something called reiteration. A redwood is a fractal. And as they put out limbs, the limbs burst into small trees, copies of the redwood. — Richard Preston

Merino sheep, Susie told me, are by far the most common breed in Australia - the wool capital of the world - and they have it worst. They are bred to have wrinkled skin, like the shar-pei dog breed, meaning extra surface area of wool per sheep. But near their backsides, those wrinkles serve as breeding grounds for flies and maggots and contribute to a buildup of urine and feces. "So what do the farmers do? They slice big swaths of skin off, using knives or shears, in order to create patches of smooth scar tissue. The process is called 'mulesing.' And they do this, as you can probably guess, without anesthesia or painkillers of any kind," she said with disgust. — Jenny Brown

Emerging, as we had, from the dark and gloomy bowels of the earth, the scene before us presented a view of wondrous beauty, and, while doubtless enhanced by contrast, it was nevertheless such an aspect as is seldom given to the eyes, of a Barsoomian of today to view. To me it seemed a little garden spot upon a dying world preserved from an ancient era when Barsoom was young and meteorological conditions were such as to favor the growth of vegetation that has since become extinct over practically the entire area of the planet. In this deep valley, surrounded by lofty cliffs, the atmosphere doubtless was considerably denser than upon the surface of the planet above. The sun's days were reflected by the lofty escarpment, which must also hold the heat during the colder periods of night, and, in addition to this, there was ample water for irrigation which nature might easily have achieved through percolation of the waters of the river through and beneath the top soil of the valley. — Edgar Rice Burroughs

This is the whole problem with words. There is so little surface area to reveal whom you might be underneath, how expansive and warm, how casual, how easygoing, how cool, and so it all comes out a little pathetic and awkward and choked. — Rebecca Lee

I have to exfoliate my lips as they're quite a large surface area and sometimes when I wear lipstick, it goes all cakey. So I mix brown sugar with lip balm and just scrub it onto them. — Georgia Jagger

The surface area of this root system is easily one hundred times greater than that of all the leaves put together. — Hope Jahren

Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has proved that if two black holes unite, the surface area of the final black hole must exceed the sum of the surface areas of the initial black holes. For these reasons the total black-hole portion of the universe is ever increasing. — Clifford A. Pickover

Your 40 trillion cells contain at least a quadrillion mitochondria, with a combined convoluted surface area of about 14,000 square metres; about four football fields. — Nick Lane

Overpopulation has a ceiling: earth's total surface area divided by the dimensions of one economy seat. One more baby is born and hello cannibalism. — Walter Kirn

As the sphere of understanding grows ever larger, necessarily the surface area of ignorance gets ever bigger — Dennis McKenna

If we envision that, somehow, the surface area of a black hole is a measure of the entropy it contains, then the increase in total surface area could be read as an increase in total entropy. — Brian Greene

For these creatures(humans) are for the most part malevolent and murderous by nature, able to tolerate others only insofar as they resemble themselves, capable of slaughtering each other because of a slight difference in skin colour or appearance. Also, they cannot tolerate those who do not think as they do. Although they know perfectly well, theoretically, that the surface of the inhabited globe is divided into thousands of areas each with it system of religious or scientific belief, and although they know that it is entirely by chance that any individual among them was born into this area or that area, this or that area of belief, this theoretical knowledge does not prevent them from hating foreigners in their own particular small area, and if not harming them, isolating them in every way possible. — Doris Lessing

Starlight is falling on every square mile of the earth's surface, and the best we can do at present is to gather up and concentrate the rays that strike at area 100 inches in diameter. — George Ellery Hale

But then, Cap'n Crunch in a flake form would be suicidal madness; it would last about as long, when immersed in milk, as snowflakes sifting down into a deep fryer. No, the cereal engineers at General Mills had to find a shape that would minimize surface area, and, as some sort of compromise between the sphere that is dictated by Euclidean geometry and whatever sunken treasure related shapes that the cereal aestheticians were probably clamoring for, they came up with this hard -to-pin-down striated pillow formation. — Neal Stephenson

I wish that restaurateurs would choose simpler and smaller glassware. The tables on restaurants these days are way too crowded, and mostly because the plates are too odd looking and big, and the wine glasses are so gigantic that it takes up the whole surface area and you can't move. I prefer smaller glassware. — Geoffrey Zakarian

Feral beauty tangled up and over every surface. Enormous vines and flourishing blooms swathed the area creating a shadowy, organic cathedral. A faint whiff of perfume breezed to her, like jasmine, but sweeter, more delicate - if jasmine could be more delicate without losing its scent entirely. The buzzing of alien insects reminded her of the sticky, summer days of her childhood in the South, and cicadas filled her memory with their incessant mating calls. Here, however, the insects grew louder as it grew darker. It seemed even they understood the dangers of daylight. — Jacqueline Patricks