Physics falls short for Farmers Insurance ad
I was flipping through my most recent copy of Wired magazine when I noticed this Farmer’s Insurance ad. At first glance, I was happy to see that they were using the metric system until I noticed that middle flight. Wait, the cow went a distance of 185 m/s?
Farmers fails physics
Yes, this is just a silly ad. I should relax and let it slide. Right? Then again, the insurance business is all about numbers, units, and equations.
Speaking of equations, let’s take a look at those numbers again.
A closer look at the numbers
The cow is a projectile launched at 70 degrees off the horizontal with an initial velocity of 42 m/s.
Oh no. It’s not just a little slip on a label; all the distances are wrong too.
Zip over to the Wolfram Alpha site for the correct answers.
Wolfram Alpha can solve this
Looks like I’ll be saving this image for my physics students to investigate. I guess it is back to school for Farmers.
Perhaps Farmer’s Insurance took air resistance into account, so the cow didn’t travel as far as calculated by Wolfram Alpha? Nah, I guess that can’t be it, because their numbers for 44m/s and 48m/s are too big…unless it’s a flying cow.
-mark.
Wired blogger Rhett Allain (our guest from Episode 51) continues the analysis on this.
Farmers Insurance and its ad agency respond: http://bit.ly/oiG6ql