Searching for Two A Days

If you have ever looked for info on the TV show “Two A Days”, then you will undoubtedly have Googled it. And, you will have found the show’s MTV page, its Wikipedia entry and the tv.com site discussing the show.

But, what on earth, you may ask is that Google calculator entry that appears above the results?

“two a days = 2.31481481 × 10-5 hertz”

It has to be some kind of Google “joke” right? Well, here’s the skinny and we are not talking latte:

Hertz (Hz) is the unit of frequency in “per seconds”, the reciprocal of time. One per second equals 1 Hz. There are usually 86400 seconds in a day, so “two a day” would be 2 divided by 86400 in hertz. Which is 2.31481481 × 10^-5

Obvious when you know how! What Google fails to do with its calculator is recognize that this number is not an irrational number like pi and does not stretch out to an infinity of decimal places with no apparent pattern. Instead 2/86400 is a rational number that could be converted into a fraction (It is 2/86400 or 1/43200). After the first decimal place (which is a “3″) the 148″ repeats ad infinitum.

So, why does this calculation show up when you type in the TV show name “Two a Days”. It’s either a joke, or more likely Google’s calculator algorithm spots the units of days, sees a number next to it and the letter “a” and assumes you want an answer. Try it with “three a week” and you will also get an answer “4.96031746 × 10-6 hertz”. “100 an hour = 0.0277777778 hertz”, you get the picture. Similarly, type in “pound a kilogram” and you get a conversion factor: “1 pound a kilogram = 0.45359237″ and vice versa “1 kilogram a pound = 2.20462262″ and so on. All answers are given to far too many significant figures to be practical in most measurements, for most everyday uses. I kg is 2.2 lbs, but we have discussed those issues endlessly elsewhere on this site in our how to work out significant figures section. For now it is interesting just to know how much math there is in popular TV.