I’ve been reading Dr. Seuss’s Sleep Book many, many times with my son1. I get stuck on the continuity and engineering/science questions in these books, here’s one…
How Long is a Chippendale Mupp Tail?
If you don’t know, the above creature is called a Chippendale Mupp2. He falls asleep each night after biting his tail which acts as its alarm. Its tail is so long that he apparently gets a full nights sleep before the pain wakes him up.
Pain impulses move at around 2 ft/s 3 and it’s safe to say a Chippendale Mupp needs around 8 hours of sleep4 and so:
8 hours in seconds = 28,800 seconds
28,800 seconds / 2 ft/s = 14,400 ft
14,400 ft to miles = 2.7 miles
So, for a Chippendale Mupp to get his 8 hours of snooze he has to have a 2.7-mile long tail.
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He seems to get stuck on a book for a week or more where he carries it all over the house and wants to read it at naptime and bedtime every day. ↩︎