Literally
April 30th, 2009Ok, so my cooperative argumentation (higher-level writing) has this horrible habit of saying “literally” in conjunction with things that are impossible. She, of all people, should know the meaning of that word.
This semester alone she’s said that she was “literally riveted” by a presentation and that she “literally has a ton of email” in her inbox.
This is just silly and I can’t stand it. While talking with my friend Greg he said it might be possible to figure out how many emails is literally a ton considering the weight of packets. Please, please, please help me find out; I have a burning need to walk up to her and let her know she’d have to have 8 trillion emails or whatever in order to have a literal ton of email in her inbox.
I know I sent this over twitter, but I’ll put it here so others can check it.
It’s kinda complicated the basis on which they assign paper weights. This link help a lot. http://twurl.nl/zeu6d7
Assume most emails fit on a single page, 1 email = 1 page. At 0.227 g/page (from the help of that site), a ton (907.18474 kg) would be 3,996,408.55 emails.
Packets don’t have a weight unless you count the weight of the electrons.
Ok.
Let’s say for arguments sake she printed out here emails and one email is one piece of paper. Standard printer paper weighs .013 oz. So roughly rounded 77 emails equal an ounce. Now if there are 16 ounces in a pound then it would take 1232 pages to equal 1 pound. There are 2000 pounds in a ton so the answer you seek my dear is she would have to have 2,464,000 emails to LITERALLY equal a ton of emails.
Wait that can’t be right. DAMNIT!
ok
Ream of 500 sheets of paper 5lbs. 200000 emails would equal a ton.
I SOOOO SUCK AT MATH!
@jay I never even thought about printing out the emails! I was trying to think of it more from an electro-chemical perspective. Does electricity weigh anything? But there’s got to be more to an email than just an electrical signal, right? I’ve “literally” spent a few days thinking about this. I think the answer depends on how you measure the weight of an email, but I suppose measuring the paper works.
Well it seems to me that instead of weighing out just the paper, you should consider the weight equal to a 43ยข letter. Since it is still a form of mail. But that’s just my opinion, for what it’s worth.
There are quite a few factors to take into account here because paper can weight differently based on:
- is it recycled
- what size
- humidity
For the sake of simplicity I assume a brand new sheet of non-recycled (20#) paper weighs approximately 4.54 grams. A short ton (2000lbs) is the equivalent of 907,184.74 grams. It would take 199,820.43 pieces of paper to equal a tone.
So assuming each email is no more than a page in length it would take nearly 199,820 emails to equal a tone.
However, one thing to note is that as you approach that number of emails, you can’t simply use the weight of the paper to determinethe emails. While for a few sheets of printed paper (depending on the amount of printed material and images) the ink will not significantly affect the weight, nearly 200k sheets of paper will have a significant amount of ink that will likely lessen the number of pages to reach a ton.
I won’t do that calculation though becasue it depends on what type of printer, ink, etc and you would have to calculate the amount of waste ink generated by the printing process.