I enjoy playing Google's "a Google a day," which can help hone your searching skills and almost invariably features interesting morsels of food for thought! Today's features the expression "the twinkle of an eye" (as in "in a twinkle of an eye"), which comes originally from a Hellenistic Greek expression "en atomE" (the capital E represents the Greek letter Eta, thought to have been pronounced with a long "A" sound, as in "hey," for example), which literally means something like "in an atom [of time]," meaning a period of time so short that it cannot be cut up into any shorter time period (Dr. Sheldon Cooper of "The Big Bang Theory," a brilliant theoretical physicist who's a little more nerdy and OCD than I am, could tell you that today this would be understood as the Planck time, approximately 5.39106(+/-0.00032)x10^(-44) seconds, the time it takes light to travel one Planck length, about 1.616199(+/-0.000097)x10^(-35) meters, in a "vacuum"--until Sheldon or I or anyone else comes up with a viable quantum gravity theory, that's the smallest unit of time we can meaningfully imagine!)--apparently, in medieval times (Spoiler Alert! If you haven't already done today's a Google a day and you still want to, don't read any further!), a "twinkle of an eye" was taken to mean (1 minute)/376 = 0.1595744 seconds = 159.5744 millisec or so.
Today's question asks how many "twinkles of an eye" it takes you to get to the Renaissance festival if it takes you 20 minutes to drive there. I reasoned thusly: if there are 376 twinkles of an eye in 1 minute then surely there must be (376 twinkles of an eye/minute)x(20 minutes) = 7,520 twinkles of an eye in 20 minutes! Which, in fact, is the right answer in the real world! However, when I submitted "7,520 twinkles" as my answer, the Google of "Do No Evil" fame confidently informed me that this was not the correct answer!
Somewhat gobstruck, I went ahead and clicked to see what Google World thought the right answer was and this is their "answer": a "twinkle of an eye" is (1 minute)/376 = 160 milliseconds and there are (20 minutes[=1,200 seconds])/(1 millisecond[=10^(-3) seconds]) = 1,200,000 milliseconds in 20 minutes and (1,200,000 milliseconds)/(160 milliseconds/twinkle) = 7,500 twinkles!
Of course, Google's "answer" is certainly in the right ballpark and is pretty darn close to my correct (and exact!) answer of 7,520 twinkles. But, to assert that 7,520 twinkles, which is the right answer, is not the right answer and to go on to say that 7,500 twinkles is the right answer when it clearly is not is just plain wrong!
That happened earlier today when I first tried to submit the correct answer (7,520 twinkles). In the meantime, someone at Google must have discovered the problem, because when I resubmitted my correct answer just now as "7,520 twinkles" (I didn't use quotation marks, though, I'm just using them here to indicate exactly what I resubmitted!), this was now recognized as a correct answer! The marvels of modern technology! I guess Google didn't do evil after all!
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