1How Much Coffee The Friends Drank
Kit Lovelace doesn’t consider him a super fan of the ’90s TV show Friends, but he was annoyed that no one calculated how much coffee they each drank during the series run. So, he sat down and watched all 236 episodes with pen in hand. Not only did he figure out who drank the most (Phoebe, 227 cups) but he calculated the total amount spent ($2,077.20, which includes 20% tip).
2How Much Money Joey Owes Chandler
It seems as if Friends really brings out the nerds with calculators. One bored Redditor asked someone to figure out how much Joey owes his roommate Chandler, from whom he is constantly borrowing. ASmileThatKills rose to the challenge; factoring everything mentioned in the episodes. With headshots, rent, food, utilities, and even Joey’s hernia operation included, he came to a grand total of $119,760.
3How Many Humans Are Alive in The Walking Dead
Better start procreating fast
The zombie apocalypse portrayed in The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead has killed scores of humans. But exactly how many are still alive? The show itself provides no specific number, but that didn’t stop fan Matt Lieberman from taking information from the TV shows and comic books to create an interesting YouTube video where he explains how he got the total. [Spoiler Alert: It’s 382,885]
4How Rich is Harry Potter
Boy wizard Harry Potter is loaded, and fan Redditor NeokratosRed posted what he calculates is the exact amount of his wealth. He figured it out by taking a few screen grabs of Vault 687 shown in the first movie and, using a complex series of measurements and mathematical equations, came up with a minimum of 50,625 Galleons. From there he calculated their worth at $1,265,625, or £870,922.
5Odds of James Bond Surviving
You Only Live 1.4e-104
As a fun challenge, New Scientist magazine asked its readers to calculate the probability that James Bond was still alive. Reader Gordon Stanger rose to the challenge, by calculating the number of bullets taken by the spy. His total: 4,662. From there he formulated that his chance of being alive after all of this was 1.4 x 10 to the power of minus 104.
6Which Sports Teams Have Fewer Fans Than Their Namesakes?
After reading a comment from a disgruntled Chicago Bears fan, a math nerd decided to test his hypothesis. The comment was: “There are more bears than Bears fans.” He went through (almost) every football team and compared the number of its fans vs. the actual person/animal/creature. He found there were actually more Bears fans (12,092,476) than bears (1,148,364). Some of the big losers were the Falcons, the Cardinals, and the Dolphins.
7How Powerful Is Superman?
He’s stronger than a locomotive, but what does that actually mean? One fanboy, JtiksPies, tried to figure it out by analyzing Superman’s “Kryptonian Crush” in the video game Injustice: Gods Among Us. Using a screen grab and some geometry, he concluded, “Superman delivered 1.02E10 Joules of energy into that punch. In better terms, that’s 2.43 tons of TNT.”
8How Much Did It Cost Jim to Prank Dwight on The Office?
The most expensive prank involved Jim and Pam learning morse code estimated at $3120
A recurring gag on The Office is Jim’s relentless pranking of the gullible Dwight Schrute. An intrepid fan created a Google spreadsheet that calculated the total dollar spent. While many were free (such as the time Jim convinced Dwight Thursday was Friday), some were more expensive (such as when Jim shipped Dwight’s desk to Roswell, New Mexico). Total cost: $5,590.95.
9Every Shot in the NBA
He calls it DataBall
This is surely the most impressive (and useful) calculation on our list! An in-depth article in Wiredmagazine tells the story of statistician/basketball geek Kirk Goldsberry, who was able to scrape data from the web to compile stats on every single shot ever played in the game of basketball. By charting the location and frequency of every shot in the NBA, Goldsberry was able to create a map of the strengths and weaknesses of each player’s offensive game. This has the potential to revolutionize the analysis of players much in the same way Moneyball changed baseball.
10Distances in Game of Thrones
Crakehall to Old Oak: 130 miles
Fear not, GoT fans, there’s a nerd out there thinking of you! A young insomniac who goes by Imperial_Affectation spent one long night calculating the distance between places in Westeros and Essos, where the fictional adventure takes place. He said he used the Pythagorean theorem and a map in French he didn’t understand to come up with the distances.