Apparently breaking up really is hard to do.

So here's an old-ass post that's been buried in my "Drafts" folder for months. I was gonna delete it, but I like the thought I put into determining the casket size (in last season's finale of 'Lost'), so I figured I'd post it. I have other, old, still barely relevant posts which I may throw on the blog to fill time until I get around to spewing something more meaningful (er...more meaningful for this blog, at least).

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So, you remember a month or two ago when I went on about the wife and I breaking up with "our formerly-one-and-only "must see" TV show, "Lost"? Yeah? Well...we've decided to take her (er...him?) back.

According to a number of friends, we broke up the episode before the series pulled itself together. After a couple of purchases on iTunes, we were able to catch up. After that, we watched the remainder of the season on ye ole' DVR.

And I wholeheartedly agree with the friends who said we left at the exact wrong time. The remainder of the season was pretty great. Much better than the first half (IMHO).

Anyway, I write this not as a review of the show or season, but as an analysis of one aspect of it. At one point, Jack, the doctor character, is shown standing over a casket at a funeral home. The mysterious inhabitant of the casket is not made known. In the world of the online Lost-nerds, there is much speculation as to who it is. I (being a Lost-nerd, again), thought the casket looked smaller than average. There are those who share this opinion, and those who don't. Thinking about it a bit, I *think* I have a way to estimate the size of the casket, providing a possible clue to its owner.

Using a screencap of the scene from the Lost Easter Eggs blog



I measured the width of Jack's hand (in pixels):


Hand: 36 pixels wide

and the width of the casket (also in pixels) along roughly the center of its' parallelogram shape (due to weird camera angle):


Casket: 392 pixels wide

Divide the width of the casket by the width of the hand, and you
should get how many "hands" wide the casket is:

392 / 36 = 10.8888

So the casket is 10.8888 x the width of the hand.

Width of my hand as spread out the same way jack's hand is in the image: 6 inches

Assuming my hand is the roughly the same width as jacks (in reality, me being 6'6", my hand may well be larger than Jack's, which would make the casket even smaller than my numbers indicate) multiply the width of my hand (6") by the number of "hands" wide the casket is (10.8888) should give us the width of the casket in inches:

6 x 10.8888 = 65.3328 inches

Divide by 12 to get the width in feet:

65.3328 / 12 = 5.4444 feet wide

Small casket.

Small casket = small body.