Speed is represented as a certain distance divided by a certain time. Common units of speed are miles per hour, meters per second, and kilometers per hour. For example, if I were to drive my car 120 miles in 2 hours, we would say that my average speed was 60 miles per hour.
I want to express the speed of light in two of the most beloved units in the United States of America: football fields and business days. Now, football fields is a unit that is sometimes used for area [i.e. this parking lot is bigger than two football fields] and sometimes used for distance [i.e. the Moon is over 4 million football fields away]. Obviously for this exercise we will be taking football fields as a unit of distance.
But how long is a football field? Well, the actual area where you’re allowed to touch the ball without being considered out of bounds is a 120-yard by 53.5-yard rectangle, which includes the end zones. But you could argue that the playing field is 100 yards long, with a 10-yard end zone on each end. So is a football field 120 yards long or 100 yards long? In my opinion, when people use the football field unit of distance, they’re typically referring to a length of 100 yards, so that’s what we’ll use.
So, in physics class, I learned that the speed of light is 299,792,458 meters per second. According to Google, 1 meter = 1.09361 yards. After performing some simple multiplication on my calculator, we find that the speed of light is 327,856,030 yards/second, which is 3,278,560.3 football fields/second.
Now, the business day is where things get more interesting. So, 1 day = 24 hours = 1,440 minutes = 86,400 seconds. But business days do not equal days. Over the course of 7 days, 5 business days occur. So 1 business day should equal (1 day)*(7/5), right?
Wrong! That would assume that every week is exactly alike, which they are not.
At time of writing, there are 11 federal holidays in the United States. Okay, so over the course of an entire year, there are 365 days. So there are, on average, 104.2857 non-work days and 260.7143 work days. So if we add 11 days to the non-work days [and subtract 11 from the work days], we get 115.2857 non-work days and 249.7143 work days. So instead of 1 business day = (1 day)*(7/5), we should have 1 business day = (1 day)(365/249.7145), which would mean 1 business day = 1.4617 days.
But wait there for just one second! Not all federal holidays are the same. Some are fixed to a specific day of the week [Thanksgiving on Thursday, Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Monday, etc.], and others are fixed to a specific date [New Year’s Day on 1/1, Christmas on 12/25, etc.]. So the federal holidays don’t all take away one work day every year. MLK Jr. Day, Washington’s Birthday [colloquially called “President’s Day”], Memorial Day, Labor Day, Columbus Day, and Thanksgiving are all fixed to specific days of the week. That means that we’re guaranteed to have 6 days taken from our initial 260.7143 work days and added to our initial 104.2857 non-work days.
What do we do with the rest, though?
Well, the non-day-of-the-week-fixed federal holidays [NDOTWFFH’s] are New Year’s Day, Juneteenth, Independence Day, Memorial Day [formerly known as Armistice Day], and Christmas. At first I thought I’d just multiply the remaining, non-day-of-the-week-fixed federal holidays by 5/7 and then add that to the non-work day total. Easy. But then I started second-guessing myself. It seems obvious, but is it really true that all the NDOTWFFH’s have a 5/7 chance of being on a weekday?
I don’t know why they wouldn’t. Maybe I just doubt my own mind all the time.
Anyway, I started a new Google Sheet. I began to fill it with dates and corresponding days of the week. I set to determine the likelihood that any given NDOTWFFH would fall on a weekday. Then I thought, “What am I doing?” I just went to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management website, and they list all of the federal holidays for each year, and what date they fall on. And guess what? We get 11 federal holidays no matter what days the NDOTWFFH’s fall on! Duh! Now that I think about it, it would be pretty fucked up if they just gave fewer holidays if Christmas was on Saturday. But hey, it’s a fucked up world.
So where are we, then? We’re back to 115.2857 non-work days and 249.7143 work days.
Wait a second, LEAP DAY! Leap Day, what a beautiful day. In the average leap year, we’d have [(366 days)*(5/7)] – 11 federal holidays = 250.4286 work days. In the average four-year cycle, we’d have [(249.7143 work days)*(3)]+250.4286 work days = 999.57146 work days. So close to one thousand! And over the course of four years, we have 1461 days in total.
Therefore, 1 business day = (1 day)*(1461/999.57146) = 1.4616263653626124939581608302422 days. That’s according to my calculator.
We’re getting pretty close now, can you feel it? It’s exciting.
The speed of light is (3,278,560.3 football fields/second)*(86,400 seconds/1 day)*(1.4616263653626124939581608302422 days/1 business day) = 414,031,407,122.3 football fields per business day. That’s a lot!
Lefty Forrester 