I knew a guy who was asked, when interviewing for a job at a supply and logistics firm in the late nineties, to figure out how many golf balls could fit inside a commercial airliner. With the proper information—the diameter of a golf ball; the general dimensions of the fuselage; whether the volume was empty or full of seats and bulkheads—it would be simple enough to come up with a reasonable answer for anyone with some high-school geometry and common sense. How many spheres of identical size wil