TITLE: Are there any "related rates" calculus problems that don't feel contrived?
QUESTION [58 upvotes]: I just finished teaching a freshman calculus course (at an American state university), and one standard topic in the curriculum is related rates. I taught my students to answer questions such as the following (taken, more or less, from the textbook): 

A man starts walking due north at 5 ft/sec from a Point A. Ten seconds later, a woman starts walking south at 4 ft/sec from a point 20 ft due east of Point A. How fast are they moving apart when the woman has been walking for ten seconds?
A 6' man walks away from a 20' lamppost at a speed of 5 ft/sec. How fast is the distance between the tip of his shadow and the top of the post changing when he is 40' away?
A baseball player runs from first base to second at 20 ft/sec, and simultaneously another baseball player runs from third base to home at the same speed. How fast are they approaching each other after one second?

To put my question bluntly: Who cares?
My students do, but only because they know these questions will appear on their exams. The baseball question (or something very similar) is actually an exercise in Stewart, and I struggled in vain to imagine a situation in which the manager of a baseball team would need to know the answer.
This is in stark contrast to many other topics addressed in first-year calculus -- optimization, basic differential equations, etc. -- which are realistic models of questions of natural interest in business, biology, etc. Basically, all the related rates questions seemed to be cooked up in response to the fact that calculus students now knew a method to solve them.
My question is in the title. Can anyone share any related rates questions which don't seem quite as contrived, and which might naturally seem interesting and motivated to a typical class of college freshmen?
Thank you!

REPLY [3 votes]: The following example is contrived, but I created it with the same frustration at the boring and repetitive nature of most related rates problems. Since I found this MO question by doing a google search for a "really interesting related rates problem," I'm recording this here for other instructors looking for juicier problems.
Question: What is the rate of change of the width of a shadow as you walk away from a street lamp considered as a point light source which is higher than your head? You can model yourself as a rectangle is you'd like! 
The answer to this question was surprising to me. You can also ask for the rate of change of the trapezoidal shadow's area.