yknow the thing i love about wolframalpha is that it can just calculate the weirdest shit and it will never question what the fuck you're doing. you can ask how much 20 bagels per FIFA football field area each hockey match duration is and it will gladly tell you that its ~7-18 second bagels per square meter
So at first I was confused, but I'm a dimensional analysis kind of girl, so I got out a pencil and paper and scribbled down a bunch of stuff and I'm not a lot less confused now but I do see what happened there. I can't tell you why it happened, but, honestly, I work in biology and nothing in biology makes any sense it just happened because it happened, so this unit looks exactly like a natural outcome of evolution.
I've also done a whole lot of laughing and I'm not certain if that's because this is actually hilarious or just that this seems to be the part of my hormonal cycle when everything feels like extremely a lot, which while it includes the sads also means everything funny is hilarious and everything affirming is euphoric so I'll take it.
Glances up from a desk covered in handwritten scratchpads covered in equations, mumbling, "...if you think about it, second-bagels per square meter is really a measure of absement..."
so wolframalpha uses an AI to parse the natural language you give it. AIs pretend to be smart, occasionally pretend to be smart enough to be useful but are not really smart. but that isn't a problem in w/a because it just does the "input interpretation" segment. other than that it's pure math.
so let's see if w/a is lying to us or if it really can't convert bagels to miles:
aha! so w/a really doesn't know the dimensions of a bagel.
but wait! it knows the mass. we can go from there!
okay. so let's assume that we're talking about wheat-based bagels. we can compare if they are similar by just asking w/a, and they're similar enough for our calculation.
the next step is to get the volume of a bagel. w/a doesn't know the volume of a bagel directly, but it knows the mass of a bagel and the density of the stuff it's made of:
so let's just ask it what "bagel mass / density bread" is. the result seems promising:
now we just need to go from bagel volume to bagel dimensions. and as with all problems in life, w/a can try to help us! so let's just calculate how much volume of a 1m³ cube a bagel which touches the edges of the box takes up. so we just ask it for the volume of a torus with an outer radius of 0.5m and an inner radius of 0.125m (last number for a rough donut shape instead of a ring), and it gives us a nice result:
now we divide our 1m³ box by our 0.2169m³ bagel and we get our bagel constant of 0.2169. so we ask it for our bagel mass / density bread / bagel constant:
and by clicking on our result, w/a automatically gives us the cube dimensions:
and we could have done this a while ago, but that would be cheating, but just to verify, let's ask google how big a bagel is:
our calculation of ~4.75 inch seems to be almost perfect.
problem is, w/a (rightfully so) doesn't just let you map one unit of measurement to another (because it sees a bagel as a unit of measurement), so we have to be a bit more specific, so we have to ask for the distance from the UK to america with a bagel per 4.75 inch, and, drumroll please:
57,520,000 bagels.
you're welcome.
