Thursday, April 20, 2017

FUN WITH MATH: I Told Him "A Million Times" Equals Exactly What?



I was grabbing a quick bite at an In N Out on Washington today when I overheard the girl sitting behind me (“overheard” as in “really had no choice”) engaged in a phone conversation with (presumably) her UltraBFF. In this simplistic tirade of simple terms that would make Donald Trump appear a Rhodes Scholar, she uttered these words: “Ohmygawd. I, like looked at him and said, I told you a million times....” In fact, several moments later, she said it again.... and again.......and again. It was at this moment I wondered: I’ve heard people say this so often, and it never crossed my mind: How long, exactly, WOULD it take to tell somebody something a “million times”?
The obvious choice might be “forever”. 1,000,000 is a massive number. So, I had little choice but to embark on a Math Adventure to figure out this suddenly all-consuming quest for knowledge. How long, exactly, would this 16 year old have to say whatever she “told him” to reach the magic million?
Let’s find out:
First, let’s assume the “told you”, or TY, takes ten (10) seconds to speak-- something to the order of “Like, ohmygawd, you know I love pink and hate purple because Jenna Peterson likes purple and I, like, hate her sooooooo much”. That’s about ten seconds (if not, add another “like” or two).
So, TY = 10 sec. That’s 6TY/minute. 60 min/h would then be 6TYx60=360 TY/hr.
24hr/day (d) would then be 360TY/hr x 24/hr = 8640 TY/d. Without a break -- no almond milk latte, or yoga, or even breathing -- she can fit a maximum of 8640 “told you’s” in to a 24 hour period of time.
The magic number is 1,000,000, so to find out how much time it would take, we divide one million by 8640.... which is a full day of TY.
This equals 115.740740740740 (I suppose -740 infinity). So, let’s round that up to 115.75.
It would take the girl, non-stop with no breaks, 115 days and 18 hours to say whatever she “told him” a million times. A human can go three weeks without food, and a week without water (not to mention phone battery life and dude simply just walking the fuck away). Which means, unless she’s an android, this is physically impossible.
Unless she spaced the 115.75 days out over a vast amount of time. However, I simply cannot fathom a girl who bookends each sentence with “ohmygawd” and uses “like” as preposition, conjunction, and adverb in a ten second span of grammatical brilliance to understand simple math and, in a split second, apply said math on the fly... mid-thought!
Nope nope nope..... nope. Not gonna happen.
Never thought In N Out Burger could be so enlightening.