Where can you have the longest birthday ever?
We all know someone who refuses to settle for a single birthday celebration. Twenty-four hours never seems to be enough. If singing ‘Happy Birthday’ like a broken record isn’t your jam, where can you send your friend to ensure they have the longest actual birthday ever?
The first place on Earth to reach a new day is Kiritimati (Christmas Island), which sits in GMT+14. If your friend arrives just before midnight local time, they can celebrate until 12:30 PM with any of the island’s 1,692 residents. Then, they can hop across the International Date Line to Honolulu, Hawaii (GMT-10), landing at noon on the same calendar day. Despite already celebrating for 26 hours, they’d still have another 12 hours to sip Mai Tais, drunkenly coming to terms with the death of their day as the sun sets into the horizon.
Alternatively, you could ship them to either the northernmost or southernmost points on Earth, where they could walk in a circle through all the time zones in a matter of minutes (frostbite permitting). A more ambitious – albeit slightly impractical – option would be to slow Earth’s rotation by installing massive rocket engines around the equator, firing in the opposite direction of its spin. This would require more energy than human civilisation has ever produced, whilst simultaneously decimating the 13 countries along latitude 0°, but – in theory – it could extend their birthday indefinitely.
If you didn’t really like this person and you were just going to their birthday celebrations out of obligation, I’d recommend sending them to Miller’s Planet, orbiting the supermassive black hole Gargantua. Here, spacetime is so warped that time dilation would cause their 24 hour birthday to last 168 years – ensuring you never have to endure another ‘birthday week’ with them again.
How long would it take to go down every road in Jersey on a Lime Scooter?
Since Evie Bikes were cancelled for being the drunk man’s stallion, I’ve been mourning the loss of Jersey’s most entertaining form of public transport. Nothing beats draining your bank account zipping around on an electric vehicle, all whilst looking like a high-class whopper. The electric scooter – the infamous cousin of the public e-bike – receives a lot of hate, despite the fact that many of us wouldn’t hesitate to hop on one for a quick trip in a walkable city. But if Jersey were to introduce Lime scooters, how long would it take to ride one down every single road on the island?
For an island of just 45 square miles, Jersey has an extensive network of ‘highways’, spanning 358 miles. These sprawling routes are composed of various classifications of roads, among them 67 miles of green lanes with a strict 15mph limit. If you wanted to complete your quest legally, whilst still making full use of the scooter’s acceleration potential, it would take around 23 hours to cover every stretch of tarmac on the island.
However, several factors could increase that estimate. Jersey’s topography is fairly hilly, and uphill climbs would inevitably slow the scooter down. You might assume that over hundreds of miles, inclines and declines would balance each other out, but since Lime scooters come with an automatic braking system for legal reasons, it’s rational to expect an overall increase in travel time – probably by at least 10%.
Another logistical hurdle is battery life. Lime scooters typically last just 25 miles per charge, meaning you’d need 15 full charges to complete the challenge. If this were a solo mission, you’d either have to beg random strangers for plug sockets every hour or convince a Gen Z Lime employee to sponsor your journey as part of their social media marketing campaign, following you round with a camera and 14 spare scooters. If that failed, you’d be looking at an additional 42 hours of downtime just for charging, bringing your total journey to about 65 hours.
Are there more clock hands or human hands in the world?
There are around 8 billion people on Earth, most of whom have two hands, bringing the total number of human hands to roughly 16 billion. Every analogue clock also has at least two hands, with some going the extra mile and featuring a third for seconds. If we assume that 1 in 5 people owns a watch, that’s 1.6 billion watches, and thus 3.2 to 4.8 billion watch hands alone.
If you take into account the clocks within households, this number begins to snowball. According to the World Population Review, the average global household size is 3.45 people. Dividing the total population by this number gives us roughly 2.3 billion households. All it takes is for each of these households to have just one analogue clock, before we can add another 4.6 to 6.9 billion clock hands to our total. This is without taking into account the clocks found in schools, workplaces, public spaces, antique shops and pawn shops.
Even so, the ratio of clock hands to human hands still stands – at best – at 3:4. If we were living in the golden age of analogue timekeeping, before digital technology began eating away at clock hands, maybe we could have had a chance of reaching equilibrium. Alas, in today’s world, where digital screens have largely replaced ticking dials, human hands still outnumber their mechanical counterparts – at least, for now.
