Question: What is the smelliest fart ever recorded by a human?
Short answer: See below.
Long answer: Today marks the one-year anniversary of the smelliest fart ever recorded. It was so powerful that it saturated our air pollution sensor, as seen in the plot below:
The sensor has a maximum reading of 60 ppm of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), but fortunately we were able to reconstruct the actual levels of stink, using our advanced mathematical modeling methods. These methods are based on fitting the observable data to the Smoluchowski Diffusion Equation:
which allows us to recover the peak stink M at the source of the fart, x0. From this analysis, we find that the fart in question originated at x0 = 1.04” above the collection tube, as expected from previous work. Near time t = 0, we approach a space-time singularity, which is the point at which smelliness is maximal.
Near the singularity, this fart attained a stinkiness of M = 890.7 ppm, a remarkable value that would be lethal in larger quantities. The estimated stink value near the source is shown in black in the plot below, along with the model fits to the observed data (other colors):
The fart was produced by College member DickPound, and to commemorate the occasion, next week’s post will feature an interview on this topic.