Micky D’s 2nd Law of Gravity

By Aaron on December 26, 2006 at 3:30 pm | In Blog Posts |

Someone on the LiveJournal Astronomy Community noticed that the McDonald’s Happy Meal has a space theme to it this week. There just happens to be a McDonalds within eye sight of where I wait to pick up my wife from work. So instead of spending those 15 minutes in a state of inclined-car-seat repose, I made with the drive through, abused the scanner and bring you science visualization of the highest order.

I think they meant that you can jump six times higher on the Moon than you can on Earth, all else being equal, on account of the Moon being 1/6 the mass of the Earth, thus with 1/6 the gravity.
We should really applaud McDonald’s for attempting to inject some science in between doses of carbs, fats, sugar and caffeine. This is probably the result of an entry level graphic designer who found some trivia site on the Internet and copy and pasted. Let’s be honest here, the goal of bag art is to carry food make children happy and excited while they eat so they will come to associate happiness with McDonalds. So it’s further proof that kids have an innate love of astronomy in that such a major company wants to associate itself with it. But this is the part that makes it downright funny:

I grew up in Texas, where Baylor’s College of Medicine is supposed to be well respected, hard to get into, etc. But I really wonder now. Why are they associated with McDonald’s? Especially when the only mention of anything close to being medical on this bag is that milk can help you grow. Woah! BCM is involved with cutting edge nutritional science! I think these commercials were much more effective.

Is it me, or are the spammers going to have a field day with this one?

Per the pic on the right, I know monkeys can sometimes be found in rockets, but not on them. And they usually aren’t happy about it.

Here is the entire bag:

Side 1
Side 2

The other two sides were about dinosaurs. I wonder if there is a Slacker Vertebrate Paleontology site out there…