How Howstuffworks Works

10:44am - 16 June 2007 - 229 views -
Posted in: Daily

I was doing my routine browsing on sites which I subscribe to through feeds when I saw an interesting topic from Howstuffworks (Yes, I subscribe to it. And yes, I know it’s boring). Topics from Howstuffworks typically goes like How Gas Turbines Work? and How Car Crushers Work? but this one was different. It went:

Peek under the hood for the ultimate image gallery all about engines. This special collection includes original HowStuffWorks animations on engines.

And I thought, wow, that sounded interesting (I know, I know). I promptly went to the site and was greeted by a nice-looking engine.

Very normal. Very interesting. That is until I wanted to click Next. To my horror, There were TWO THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED AND FORTY SEVEN slides. There were no other indexes besides the page count, and neither were the pages ordered chronologically. I had no way of telling what to expect from the 2547 pages. I wanted to know how long reading all of them will take, so I did some calculations.

_{Just kidding.}

Assuming I’d take 15 seconds for every slide (and that’s a very conservative estimation considering I didn’t take into account of the time needed to load the page) - I’d take 10.6215 hours to finish reading each and every one of them. Ten hours. I couldn’t play my favourite game for that long continuously. Neither can I work on my computer for that amount of time. Even a geek as geeky as me would find it difficult to stay on the computer for ten hours in a stretch. That basically meant that it was impossible to finish reading all the slides in a day, even if I were to start reading early in the morning.

So, I skipped to slide 2000 and went “aaahh!” and closed the window.

And carried on surfing elsewhere.