How big is Sade's love? This is what happens when nerds listen to smooth jazz.

So, to avoid listening to the same news about the election, the war, the next war, and the finacial bail out of the real axis of evil, I threw in a Sade CD. One of my favorite songs, even though I am not a smooth jazz guy, is the track Is It a Crime?. In it are the lines:

• My love is wider than Victoria Lake
• Taller than the Empire State

So, being a nerd, I was wondering how big, approximately, is this love?

I was lousy at math as a kid, but now that I am being treated for ADD, math makes sense, I just don't have the chops for it, so humour me ;-)

Here are some numbers:

• Lake Victoria, according to Wikipedia (I know, don't get me started) is at its widest point 250km (155.343 miles).
• The Empire State Building is, again from Wikipedia, 1472ft to the top of the spire (448.666m)

If we make this a triangle, the area would be 56,083,250m². That is roughly 5192.8 futbol fields (FIFA standard maximum, 120m x 90m).

Now for the hard part. What is the volume of this love, if it were a cone? More numbers:

• Our radius (r) is 125,000m (using 250,000m as diameter)
• Height (h) is 448.666m
• So, the hypotneus (s) is 125,000.80520212482215272756151342m (r² + h² = s²)
• The volume of a cone is πrs
• π = 3.14159265358979323846

So the volume is 49,087,701,414.47552m³, that is 49,087,701.41447552 litres. Not sure what to compare that to other than around 25,000,000 two liter sodas!

That is a lot of love!

My math could be way off, but I was feeling particularly nerdy this morning :-)