FTLR – calculating omphalabyrinth strength

A couple of people and I have been drawing city-sized labyrinths to form our knot in the omphalos net. (For a list of the 27 cities and their knot details, check out the excellent wiki page.)

I came up with a couple of big but asymmetrical and ugly designs, and jasper in Austin drew up some truly beautiful, evenly-spaced circuits. After sending them off to Eli Hunt, he selected two – one as a main labyrinth, and one as a second, bonus option. Here is how I calculated their strength as knots in the net:

- Using this Google Maps distance calculator, I measured the widest parts of the labyrinths (as per Mr. Hunt’s instructions) and converted the miles to kilometers
- The next step is to convert meters to stadia, an ancient unit of length. For our purposes, we use the Olympic numbers, meaning that 185 meters = 1 stadia
- The omphalabyrinth strength formula is (Stadia x number of Circuits)/6
 
 

Jasper’s labyrinth (dubbed “elegant” by Mr. Hunt) is 7 circuits, and 1.757 miles across (or 2827 meters/15.281 stadia) – making its strength 17.82.
 
 

This semi-wonky four-quadrant labyrinth (dubbed “charming” by Mr. Hunt) is also 7 circuits (measured after the method of the Sao Paolo labyrinth), and is 5645 meters (or 30.5 stadia) across, making its strength 35.6.

According to sapagoo in IRC, “if we have 27 omphalabyrinths with an average strength of 11-13, we should be good. so I would classify a strength of 17.8 as “Great” and helping to offset the small omphalabyrinths we are bound to have.” So, good news overall! I’m sure the whole Dallas team will want to do both; we have yet to schedule a date, but I’m hoping the people from other Texas cities will be able to travel in for the event.