On the Reconstitution of a Regulation Sheet: A Technical Bulletin from R.I.N.K.
The Royal Institute for Nascent Kinetics has completed a short measurement program on the settled density of recovered resurfacing material. This program was not requested by Le Permanent Council. It was not requested by the teams. It was not requested by Graine Wetsky Funds, who own the instruments R.I.N.K. would ordinarily have had to ask to borrow, and who were not asked.
R.I.N.K. does not require authorization to conduct research. R.I.N.K. is an Institute.
The finding is one number. R.I.N.K. will state it, then show the arithmetic beneath it, because a number stated without its arithmetic is an assertion and R.I.N.K. does not make assertions.
One regulation sheet of ice is 1,012,800 kcups of Ice Shavings.
Why R.I.N.K. looked
R.I.N.K. maintains a standing interest in the resurfacing, dating to the Institute's collaboration with T.A.P.E. and predating the marketplace by some margin. Between the first horn ever sounded and the 15th of June, the material The Jambono returns had no unit, no price and no ledger, and was therefore not a quantity. It has been a quantity for fifteen weeks.
R.I.N.K. observes that a quantity invites a conversion, and that no conversion has been published.
R.I.N.K. has published one.
The measurement
The unit. A kcup is one Hockay Puck of volume, as fixed by Le Council in June. R.I.N.K. has measured the displacement of a regulation Puck directly, in triplicate, under laboratory conditions, and records it at 115.825 cubic centimetres. R.I.N.K. will not be revising this figure. The Puck is a manufactured object and its dimensions are a matter of specification rather than opinion.
The sheet. Le Council's building standard specifies a playing surface of 61.0 metres by 30.0 metres, finished to a depth of 25 millimetres. R.I.N.K. has verified the standard against nine buildings selected without regard to conference and found the standard observed in all nine, to within the tolerance of R.I.N.K.'s instruments, which R.I.N.K. is not disclosing.
A sheet is therefore 45.75 cubic metres of finished ice. Expressed in the unit of trade, that is 394,992 kcups, if the kcups were solid.
They are not solid. This is the whole of the problem and the only part of the work that required an instrument.
Recovered shavings are not ice. They are a suspension of ice in air, and the ratio of the two is not stable at the moment of recovery—it settles. R.I.N.K.'s instruments recorded the settle across eleven hundred sample cups drawn from nine buildings at seven intervals from the horn, and the curve flattens at a value R.I.N.K. is comfortable reporting to three figures.
Settled shavings carry 0.390 of the density of the sheet that produced them.
R.I.N.K. notes, without drawing a conclusion, that this value did not move when the Recovery Assemblies were rebuilt on the 12th. More material is being caught. The material is the same material.
The conversion
394,992 kcups solid ÷ 0.390 settled density = 1,012,800 kcups
The p-value is 1. R.I.N.K. considers this satisfactory.
R.I.N.K. will pre-empt three objections, having received versions of all three from its own subcommittee.
That the shavings would have to be melted and re-frozen, and would lose volume in the process. They would not. The material is not water and does not behave as water. It is ice that has been separated from a sheet and has not stopped being ice, which is why it returns to the sheet at the boards in roughly forty seconds when nothing is in its way, and why it melts within twenty-four hours when something is. R.I.N.K. did not establish this. Le Council's Phenomenological Assessment Division established it years ago and shelved it. R.I.N.K. has merely weighed it.
That the figure is a physical impossibility because a sheet requires a building. R.I.N.K. accepts that a sheet has historically required a building. R.I.N.K. observes that this is a statement about the history of buildings and not about the quantity of ice.
That the figure describes something nobody is doing. R.I.N.K. has no comment on this objection. R.I.N.K.'s mandate covers the measurement.
Closing note
R.I.N.K. wishes to record two things and will then stop.
The first is that 1,012,800 is a large number relative to a fan's cup and a small number relative to a season. The marketplace released something near 91,000 kcups last night alone. At the rate of the last twenty-four hours, the material required to pour one regulation sheet passes across the boards of Hockay in eleven days.
The second is procedural. R.I.N.K. wishes it noted in the record that this bulletin was drafted in full before R.I.N.K. consulted the public shavings ledger, and that R.I.N.K. consulted it afterward, once, and has not amended anything above.
The Institute has no reason to have calculated this.