#we sort of have to pretend these worms are about 38 grams. which they are not. they could be compressed to the width of a sheet of paper

[worm-on-a-blog]

How many worms on strings must it take to fill a trench coat so they are able to buy a movie ticket?

spectacular question.

first we need to know the average volume of a standard worm. keeping in mind that a worm is generally less than a gram in weight, that volume could be really small if you sincerely compressed it—so for these measurements, we are assuming that none of our worms in the trench coat are compressed. we're not packing them in there like straw, they're all standing on each other's heads to puppet the trench coat.

assuming this, then, i divided up a single worm into eight segments that could each be approximated to be about the shape of a uniform cylinder, calculated the volume of each of those cylinders, and then added the total volume up. in all, our uncompressed worm came out to about 38.27 cm^3. diagram below:

(a string was used to take the circumference at the midpoint of each segment, and these were then used to calculate the diameter of each segment for the volume calculation.)

okay. we're going to say that the worms are occupying your average adult male-fit trench coat. they would be looking to fill about 80kg worth of space there, 80,000 cm^3. (1 kg = 1,000 cm^3 at human body density). but we need to subtract the legs, because they are most certainly going to have the trench coat drag on the ground. so:

one total leg would come out to about 13.488 kg of your body. double that, and we are subtracting 26.976 kg from our estimated weight. they also would not fill out the hands, so we're taking off a tiny bit more in the form of 1.04 kg. we're leaving the head in the calculation, because i presume they will be filling out an inconspicuous hat too.

put together, this gives us a volume of about 51,984 cm^3, or a final answer of 1,358.35 worms to fill a trench coat!

this also means that you're able to calculate how many worms you are total so long as you know how many kg you are. take your weight in kg, convert it to cm^3 by multiplying it by 1,000, and then divide that number by 38.27. all together, i am approximately 1,306.50 worms large.