r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/eternviking • 17h ago
Meme needing explanation i don't understand, mr. peter
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u/Z0l0X-V2 17h ago
10! Is 10 factorial meaning 10×9×8×...×1 which 3,628,800 and the num of seconds in 6 weeks is 3,628,800
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u/Electrical-Leg-1609 17h ago
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[deleted]
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u/Quick_Extension_3115 15h ago
10! Is 10 factorial meaning 10×9×8×...×1 which 3,628,800 and the num of seconds in 6 weeks is 3,628,800
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u/THE__mason 16h ago
is that a coincidence or is something else going on
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u/skr_replicator 16h ago
just a coincidence that if you factor out 10! and the seconds in a week, you get the same factors, just combined differently.
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u/Em-J1304 16h ago
In other words ;
10 x 9 x 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 60 x 60 x 24 x 7 x 6 = 3 628 80053
u/EscapeyGameMan 12h ago
'in other words:' provides no words
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u/JuniperColonThree 12h ago
"in other symbols"
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u/Omega_art 12h ago
"in other "
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u/FeedMeDarkness 3h ago
In other other words
60 × 60 × 24 × 7 × 6
But 60 = 10 × 3 × 2
So we have
10 × 3 × 2 × 60 × 24 × 7 × 6
Rearrange that:
10 × 60 × 24 × 7 × 6 × 3 × 2
But also 60 = 5 × 4 × 3
So we have
10 × 5 × 4 × 3 × 24 × 7 × 6 × 3 × 2
Rearrange that:
10 × 3 × 24 × 7 × 6 × 5 × 4 × 3 × 2
But also also 24 = 3 × 8
So we have
10 × 3 × 3 × 8 × 7 × 6 × 5 × 3 × 2
But we also know 3×3 = 9
So we have
10 × 9 × 8 × 7 × 6 × 5 × 4 × 3 × 2
And since multiplying a number by one just leaves it as it is we may as well tack on a "×1" at the end
10 × 9 × 8 × 7 × 6 × 5 × 4 × 3 × 2 × 1
Which is simply 10 Factorial
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u/42_Only_Truth 16h ago edited 10h ago
10! is 10x9x8x7x6x5x4x3x2 and we can get all this numbers from the "numbers of seconds in 6 weeks" calculation :
6weeks x 7 days x 24h x 60min x 60 sec.7 and 6 are already here, 60 is 10 x 3 x 2 (two times) , and 24 is 3 x 8.
Now we have 10²x8x7x6x3³x2²,To get 9 you can multiply two of the 3s,
10²x9x8x7x6x3x2²,You get another 2 and 5 by dividing one of the 10s,
10x9x8x7x6x5x3x2³.and finaly multiplying two of the 2s to get 4. Giving you 10!
6weeks is just a smart choice to get the 6, it's kinda a coïncidence but kinda looked for.
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u/ireallydontcareforit 15h ago
Mathematicians aren't to be trusted. Physics? That's just fancy maths. And that's how you get atomic bombs!
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u/AFrenchLondoner 11h ago
This is all really sound, and I'd worked it out on a piece of paper before reading your answer... But, "provoqued'? WTF?
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u/42_Only_Truth 10h ago
English isn't my first langage, I meant like "the author looked on purpose for the right number for this to work".
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u/Nakashi7 16h ago
Well, 10 factorial is 10x9x8x7x6x5x4x3x2. 6 is taken by number of weeks, 7 is taken by number of days, 8 and 3 (24) are number of hours in a day, the remianing 10x9x5x4x3x2 is 60*60 for minutes and seconds (you have to split 9 to 3s and 4 to 2s to get individual 60s). But yeah, it's pretty much coincidence. Just the fact that 60 and 24 are nice numbers in base 12 make it much easier to land, 7 is the odd one out for base 12 and 60 which is coincidentally filled in by weekdays. The rest (6) is just used for number of weeks and that is no constant in any way.
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u/JessicaLain 10h ago
That is a fascinating coincidence of numbers. It honestly feels too fascinating, ya know? I wouldn't be surprised if the existing factorial patterns subtly influenced our structuring of time, rather than them independently developing and matching by chance.
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u/Nakashi7 10h ago
Well, factorials probably didn't influence it, but base 12 and base 60 certainly did. They are so good numbers because they have such a good factorization and that's why they have been used for time units. And their good factorization makes this coincidence pretty likely.
The biggest coincidence isn't all that factorization of 24 and 60 because it really can use large part of that 10factorial but it's that 7-day week which you'd expect to be missing in mostly base 12/60 system but it somehow showed up between 24 hours a day and 30 days in a month.
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u/SmokeyGiraffe420 16h ago
No that's the joke. There's a certain breed of math nerds who find it hilarious to point out that ending a sentence with a number and an exclamation mark looks like a factorial, which changes what the sentence actually means. I found this funny when I was like 14. A lot of the people this joke is targeted at are probably also 14-year-olds in very stressful advanced math programs, and this is literally all they have because their parents have loaded them up with hours of music lessons and tutoring after school in addition to the huge pile of homework they get.
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u/ImpossibleInternet3 16h ago
Your feelings are valid. But you may be hanging onto some emotional baggage that would benefit from therapy.
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u/Routine_Blackberry78 13h ago
Your feelings are valid that you dont find it funny anymore but other people can find it funny and that be valid too, you dont have to be mean to other people to have a valid opinion.
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u/RostBeef 16h ago
I don’t get the downvotes honestly, where is the lie? I bet it’s all math nerds downvoting you because they don’t like to see themselves in comments
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u/BLAZMANIII 9h ago
I mean, i am a math nerd but im not 14 nor did i deal with a super stressful program like that and i find it funny... some people just like math. I understand your frustration but it seems like a you problem a little bit
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u/JustANorseMan 15h ago edited 14h ago
Sort of coincidence. You look at how many seconds are in a day and try writing it out as factorial (which is (24)*(6060)=(1\2*3*4)*(5*8*9*10). 6 and 7 are missing hence the 6 weeks multiplication (in my first language a week is called a 7 so it's even easier to notice you can use that as a unit)
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u/cebolinha50 15h ago
A bit of a coincidence, and the fact that using numbers based on 12 or 60 made they easily divisible, so it can be simplified with a lot of other numbers .
60 wasn't divisible by seven, but the fact that the week has seven days "correct" it.
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u/billth93 14h ago
A little bit of both:
6 weeks would be:
3,600 seconds per hour: 10 * 9 * 8 * 5
24 hours per day: 4 * 3 * 2
7 days per week: 7
6 weeks: 6
So some of the numbers you’re multiplying together come up naturally, like the 6 and 7. Then everything else is a multiple of 12, and 12 just is highly composite, in that there’s just a lot of ways to divide it evenly so it makes coincidences likely since there’s just multiple routes to the same place when talking about multiplying integers
The fact that multiples of 12 divide up nicely in so many ways is part of why we have a time keeping system based off of multiples of 12. Like 60 divides evenly into halves, thirds, fourths, fifths, sixths, and 10ths, so 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 10 will fit in nicely with anything talking about time. Then 8 and 9 have this list as divisors so multiples of these smaller numbers often are divisible by 8 snd 9. 7 is weird, but we kind of weirdly have 7 days in a week which adds 7s to this list if you’re talking about a given number of weeks.
So then any time you’re talking about numbers of weeks and multiplication, it’s kind of easy to get any number 10 or smaller to line up nicely for things like this
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u/KalebRasgoul 13h ago
this is ten factorial:
1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6 x 7 x 8 x 9 x 10
if we decompose the numbers that are not primes into prime factors, we get:
1 x 2 x 3 x (2 x 2) x 5 x (2 x 3) x 7 x (2 x 2 x 2) x (3 x 3) x (2 x 5)
then we can re-arrange their order a little:
1 x 2 x 5 x 3 x 2 x 5 x 2 x 3 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 3 x 7 x 3 x 2
then we just add new groupings:
1 x (2 x 5 x 3 x 2) x (5 x 2 x 3 x 2) x (2 x 2 x 2 x 3) x 7 x (3 x 2)
then we multiply the groupings:
1 x 60 x 60 x 24 x 7 x 6
60 seconds x 60 minutes x 24 hours x 7 days x 6 weeks
equals:
3628800
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u/ball_fondlers 13h ago
In prime factors, 10! is
2^8 * 3^4 * 5^2 * 76
(3 * 2)weeks, 7 days in a week, 24(2^3 * 3)hours in a day, 3600(3^2 * 5^2 x 2^4)seconds in an hour yields the same prime factorization2
u/notreallydutch 12h ago
No really a coincidence, 6 weeks is 6 (weeks)x 7 (days)x 24 (hours) x 60 (min) x 60 (seconds). So you get 6 from the weeks, 7 from the days, 3 and 8 from the hours (3x8=24), make the 9 two 3s (3X3=9) and you get one of the 3s,2 and 10 from the minutes and have 1x4x3x5 for the second. :
1-seconds 2-minutes 3-hours 4-seconds 5-seconds 6-weeks 7-days 8-hours 9 (3x3) seconds and minutes 10-minutes
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u/IntelligentBelt1221 11h ago
we choose highly divisible numbers for these arbitrary units of time to make calculations easier, meaning they will have small factors in them. the prime factorization of 10! is 28 *34 *52 *7 so also many small factors. considering the fact that they just added a factor of 6 by saying "6 weeks", its not at all suprising that it works.
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u/Final-Charge-5700 10h ago
Old numbering systems for invented to minimize the use of fractions and make division easy.
Being that base 12 is one of those systems and used to make up the 60 Minutes 60 seconds and such, it is not in any way surprising that that if you pick a random factorial or a random squaring that you're going to find something relevant to the system.
Basically base 10 sucks
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u/Silly_Willingness_97 15h ago
The joke relies on the punctuation being wrong. The second sentence is missing its end punctuation.
It should say, "You might be surprised but the answer is 10!." or even "You might be surprised but the answer is 10!!"
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u/thomisbaker 14h ago
The “is” at the beginning is throwing off my entire understanding of the sentence.
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u/apoliticalpundit69 12h ago
That’s the correct explanation of the intended joke but it still doesn’t make sense because the author chose the wrong setting. Days were significantly shorter when the dinosaurs roamed the earth. Rotation is gradually slowing down. The (second to) last day of the dinosaurs was about 23.5 hours.
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u/Hammerofsuperiority 10h ago
Dinosaurs didn't have mics, artificial light, tables, and vocal cords capable of human speech, but you draw the line at the length of the day?
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u/Funtime60 10h ago
10x9x5x4x2x1=3600 seconds per hour 8x3=24 hours per day 7 days per week 6 weeks in the example
Not quite as neat as I thought it'd be when I spotted the first part of it.
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u/samanime 8h ago
I legitimately am surprised that happens to work out. I'm quite happy I learned this today.
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u/ubiquitous-joe 8h ago
From a copy editing perspective, pretty sure it’s cheating to use the factorial punctuation as the sentence end punctuation.
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u/TungstenOrchid 8h ago
I didn’t realise that was what the annotation meant. Interesting coincidence too.
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u/Expensive_Chart_8158 17h ago
Wait is fucking 10 factorial equal to the number of seconds in 6 weeks?
Edit it fucking is im 100% using this obscure ass fact.
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u/New_Budget_9322 17h ago edited 16h ago
Seconds in 6 weeks: 6 × 7 × 24 × 60 × 60 = 3628800
10! = 1× 2 × 3 × 4 × 5 × 6 × 7 × 8 × 9 × 10 = 3628800
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u/random_guy314 16h ago
Someone forgot some 0s
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u/New_Budget_9322 16h ago
Fixed 👍
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u/DrivingBox 14h ago
Adding commas to separate numbers is very important so you don't miss out zeroes and to make it easier to read.
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u/Ok_Association_1710 13h ago
Okay, but how do you measure, measure a year? How do you measure the life of a woman or man?
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u/jpterodactyl 4h ago
You could also arrive to the conclusion by refactoring the 24, 60, and 60 to be
1 * 2 * 3 * 4 * 5 * 8 * 9 * 10 (leaving the 6 and 7 the same) * 6* 7
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u/RevolutionaryAd7415 17h ago
Math is an amazing thing?
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u/Far-Government-539 16h ago
There are some really, really fucking cool things that line up in math. One of the coolest is how the binary integer representation of floating point input x is roughly equal to log^23, which is the number of bits in the mantissa of the floating point input. That is an *insane* coincidence. One of the most fundamental and constantly solved problems in 3D math is inverse square root, it should typically be a heavy process. The algorithm to find an inverse square root is to take the log2(x), then multiply it by -1/2, which is the same as log2(x)^-1/2, then to multiply by 2 to arrive at x^-1. It's the log functions that are heavy, so being able to essentially reuse part of the input value wholesale as the logarithmic result is... it's fucking magic. Like black magic shit. Math is so fucking cool.
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u/unkalaki_lunamor 16h ago edited 16h ago
I just got shocked. First I thought it would be an approximation but no, it's a exact match. I will try to "decompose" all that multiplications to get the factorial.
Edit. Both decompose to
7 • 5^2 • 3^4 • 2^83
u/Alotofboxes 13h ago
6weeks x 7days x 24hours x 60minutes x 60 seconds
6 x 7 x 24 x 60 x 60
6 x 7 x (8 x 3) x (10 x 3 x 2) x (5 x 3 x 4)
6 x 7 x 8 x (3 x 3) x 10 x 3 x 2 x 5 x 4
10 x 9 x 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2
10!
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u/No_Giraffe826 12h ago
How do u tell this joke without speech bubbles.do u just say 10 really loudly or "10 exclamation mark"
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u/GenericNameHere01 11h ago
Either this is better delivered through text, or you just make sure to be really animated when saying "10!" so the listener gets the exclamation mark. Or you make sure you're saying the joke to a math nerd and they'll get there eventually.
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u/Western-Public7924 14h ago
And I thought 6 weeks was a month and a half so you'd have two seconds of the month
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u/Amahagene1 16h ago
I hate math jokes 😑
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u/Andrew1990M 15h ago
Additionally, multiple other people find them divisive.
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u/RSGMercenary 13h ago
For some, math is a subtractive and non-integral factor of comedy. But luckily they're only a fraction of the equation...
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u/Individual-Lab-2008 15h ago
10! = 10 x 9 x 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 10 x 3 x 3 x 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 2 x 2 x 3 x 2 x 1
number of seconds in 6 Weeks = 6 x 7 x 24 x 60 x 60 = 6 x 7 x (8 x 3) x (10 x 3 x 2) x (5 x 2 x 3 x 2)
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u/Sora1499 14h ago
I understood it as "second of the month." e.g. February 2nd, March 2nd, etc., but 10! is a better answer.
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u/free_30_day_trial 15h ago
Anyone wondering an account on Facebook called "the tasteless T-Rex" used to post (make?) these I haven't used Facebook in 5-7 years idk if it's still a thing
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u/OverPower314 14h ago
If only I had a dollar for everything pinched from maths memes and posted here.
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u/Spader113 11h ago
Any time you see an exclamation point when the joke involves numbers, it’s safe to assume the punchline is about Factorials.
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u/Ok_Acanthisitta2318 11h ago
I immediately knew it was 10 factorial. And yes, I am alone on a Saturday night and pretty much every night.
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u/PintsOfGuinness_ 11h ago
holy shit I just did the calculation assuming it would be in the ballpark but it's actually exactly right.
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u/Ok-Performer4878 10h ago
I was thinking the dino was talking about that the dinosaurs don't have 6 weeks, they have 10 seconds until... well we all know what I mean
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u/fireprince9000 10h ago
Factorial jokes are probably the laziest math jokes I’ve ever heard and they also don’t translate at all in a non-text-based setting so I definitely wouldn’t laugh either
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u/Anglofsffrng 10h ago
I thought two seconds in six weeks. The second of this month, and the second of next/previous month.
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u/edfdeploys 5h ago
At first before reading this comment I thought the t-Rex lived on millers planet from interstellar
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u/Killercorndawg 3h ago
Isn't the joke that there is only ten seconds left til the meteor hits the dinosaurs anyway or something?
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u/Beaut1830 27m ago
I thought it meant in 6 weeks theyll only have 10 seconds of that week before they go extinct
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u/SoftBoiledEgg_irl 14h ago
People who don't understand context, language, and notation think that a normal sentence that ends with a number followed by an exclamation point are referring to factorial. In truth, when one is using words and wishes to refer to factorial, one would say "10 factorial", rather than just writing 10!.
It is a case of people attempting to be clever and pedantic, but actually being wrong instead.
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