The Wheels on the Bus

The other day in the car, I was thinking about absorbers and strippers - in the engineering/ChemE sense, not the red light district bar sense.  That led to a contemplation on distillation columns (can you tell that ChemE has already started taking over my life?) and for whatever reason I thought that the rhythm of “L over V” (the slope of an operating line for a distillation column when doing McCabe Thiele analysis is “flow rate of liquid over flow rate of vapor,” or “L over V”) sounded a lot like “round and round” in “The Wheels on the Bus.”  Without further ado, I present “The Slope on the Graph” with its inspiration.

The slope on the graph                                       The wheels on the bus
is L over V                                                          go round and round
L over V                                                             round and round
L over V                                                             round and round
The slope on the graph                                      The wheels on the bus
is L over V                                                         go round and round
For distillation columns                                     All through the town

And I’m not done with that song yet.  The other night I realized that I’d soon be taking the bus back to Cornell.  After some research, I found that a bus wheel has a radius of about 20 inches, for a circumference of 40π inches.  The trip back to Cornell is around 325 miles, and so, the wheels of the bus have to go round 163,866 times for me to get back to Cornell. (For the record, the wheels of a car would have to go round 218,488 times on the same trip – car tires have a radius of about 15 inches.)
Just working to bring math into your everyday lives.