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The Milk Bet lives!

Sorting it all Out
Michael Kaplan's random stuff of dubious value
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MSDN Blogs > Sorting it all Out > The Milk Bet lives!

The Milk Bet lives!

25 Aug 2005 6:25 PM
  • Comments 30

They are never going to learn this one.

Marlins suspend batboy for milk-drinking dare

I'll ignore the suspension issue and talk about the "milk bet" here.

Now this particular bet has been around for a long time. I first heard about it when I was working for the Access team, probably around eight years ago.

Heath, a fellow developer on the team with an office right next door to mine, was certain that he could drink a gallon of milk in an hour without throwing up. He went to CalTech and because of this had a very logical way of thinking this through. He could easily drink one of those one pint milk containers in just a few minutes. So the gallon could be polished off easily since it really is just eight of those one pint containers.

(for those outside the US, there are four quarts to a gallon and two pints to a quart!)

And he had a whole hour to do it, so he could take his time and make it with no problem, right?

Well, actually, it is wrong.

Fellow developer Nicholas Shulman volunteered the explanation for why the bet is never won as Heath was running to the restroom to avoid throwing up in the conference room to which we had all adjourned.

"A stomach," Nick explained with the just the right inflection for irony, "is about a half a gallon."

Milk needs time in the stomach to be broken down before it can go on -- it does a body good, but it needs a little time to do that good. And there is simply no way to break the milk down fast enough to take in a full gallon in an hour. If you try to do so, your body will rebel and if you try and force the issue, your stomach will settle the argument for you.

Perhaps some future CalTech or MIT student who has read this blog will either refuse the bet, or anticipatorily buy something that will break down the milk and drink a bunch of that right before the bet starts.

(via Spencer)

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  • 25 Aug 2005 8:15 PM
    1 gallon is approx. 4 lit(er|re)s for our SI-speaking friends. :)
  • Joe Chung
    25 Aug 2005 10:56 PM
    What if you dehydrated the milk first? ;)
  • Sushant Bhatia
    26 Aug 2005 2:46 AM
    I drink a gallon of chocolate milk a day....does that count :-)
  • 26 Aug 2005 8:22 AM
    Funny story. Only:

    > (for those outside the US, there are four quarts to a gallon and two pints to a quart!)

    Given that you mention in the line above that there are eight pints to a galleon, that must be the most useless explanation for "those outside the US" I've ever seen. You've added no new information except introducing yet another mysterious unit, the quart.
    Thanks to Mike Dunn for offering something that actually helps.
  • Jeff
    26 Aug 2005 8:29 AM
    Three of my friends did attempted this in college. In addition to the hour time limit there was the incentive to be the first one done. We made a big production of it in the dorm hall and we were prepared with 2 large trashcans. One of the three actually quit before reaching the point of no return, drank about two thirds of the gallon. The other two finished their gallons but not before emptying their stomachs a few times. I'm not sure about the wisdom of recording it all on VHS but the tape is still a part of my collection.
  • Michael
    26 Aug 2005 10:11 AM
    CornedBee, despite you're obvious superiority to the rest of us, take a breather before you post. It doesn't matter how many SI units a gallon is. He was merely trying to put gallons and pints in perspective so that the pint reference makes sense. 1 equals 8. I don't think it was his intention to give the SI world a means of exact quantification.

    A gallon is 1 unit. A pint is 0.125 units. A stomach is 0.5 units. All the information needed to enjoy the post is in there.

    I don't mean to feed the flames... Like CornedBee, sometimes I don't know when to shut up.

    Thanks for the post, Kaplan.
  • 26 Aug 2005 10:47 AM
    Sushant -- if you can do it in an hour it would count. :-)

    CornedBee -- Michael has the right idea here -- every unit has been defined well enough to limp along....

    Jeff -- I believe Heath's adventure was taped. :-)
  • 26 Aug 2005 12:12 PM
    I'm sorry I came across so harsh - I honestly didn't mean to.

    Neither do I have a problem with the units per se. I just meant to point out that the remark was about as helpful as if I invented my country (CornedCountry) and my own units (CornedQuantity) and then said:

    "1 CQ, that's easy, that's about 8 of those VeryCornedQuantity packs.

    (For those outside the CC, there are four QuiteCornedQuantities to a CornedQuantity and two VeryCornedQuantities to a QuiteCornedQuantity.)"

    What have you learned from the remark that wasn't already in the first sentence? Only that there's yet another unit somewhere between CQ and VCQ.
    Which is not helpful.

    The "most useless" was harsh - nevertheless, it's a simple objective fact. (But then, I haven't seen the phrase often.)

    So, my apologies if you feel slighted, but I stand by my core point. Which is in no way meant to devalue the comical or informational value of the post.

    Oh, and Michael, where do you get the idea that I'm superior?
  • 26 Aug 2005 12:13 PM
    One more, just to clarify. It was a question of redundancy, not of lack of information.
  • 26 Aug 2005 12:46 PM
    Indeed, I was there that fateful day, though I no longer have the photos to prove it.

    The milk bet specifically outlaws "bile doping" -- no eating powdered bile to try and increase the rate of fat breakdown. And it has to be at least 2% milk too. The reason its so hard is because the sphincter at the bottom of the stomach closes up if there is undigested fat in the stomach.

    I've been present at three or four milk bet attempts and I can report that it is in fact humanly possible. There's a guy named Andy on the search team who won the milk bet; he's a big guy.
  • 26 Aug 2005 2:51 PM
    Hey Eric -- yes, it is certainly against the whole spitit of the bet, but I would imagine that there are those who would not hesitate to stoop to that level. :-)

    Ah, I never thought about what if someone's stomach was big enough to fit that much milk....
  • Mark Kola
    26 Aug 2005 5:41 PM
    Today I was listening to my morning sports talk show "Tony D and Pappy" AM 1300. They were discussing this same topic, and one made the same bet with water. Pappy got through just over a half gallon then quit when a caller mentioned all the symptoms of "Water Poisoning".
  • Richard
    1 Sep 2005 6:02 AM
    > (for those outside the US, there are four quarts to a gallon and two pints to a quart!)

    Which is also true outside the US (albeit we rarely use quarts as a measure).

    What is different is that a US-Pint in only 16 fluid oz., rather than the imperial pint's 20fl-oz.

    Thus a US gallon is about 3.5 litres, while an Imperial gallon in 4.5 litres.

    See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallon for more information.

    So the bet is not quite as adventurous (for want of a better term) as I immediately thought.
  • ksd316
    1 Sep 2005 12:33 PM
    I drank a gallon of milk in less than 4 mintues and didn't puke. It was a bet, I took at work, the guys even went and bought me the milk. I have plenty of witnesses if no one believe me. I live in the Zanesville Ohio, US.
  • 1 Sep 2005 2:33 PM
    I think most of us are going to be stay a little skeptical on this one, sorry!
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