If I gave you 200 tokens representing your available time this week, would you spend one of them on listening to the Math/Maths Podcast?

John Read tweeted, on the occasion of our 100th episode/2nd birthday of Math/Maths, that:

to hear all 100 of them within 2 years ≈ 0.6% of the time listening.
– @johndavidread on Twitter.

This is an interesting thought, though a crude calculation based on 100 hours divided into two years.

According to an audio player I just loaded all 100 mp3 files into, the combined length of Math/Maths Podcast episodes to date is 3 days 14 hours 51 minutes. This is 3.619 days (or 86.85 hours, if you prefer).

I asked Wolfram Alpha for the number of days from 7 June 2010 (episode 1) to 9 June 2012 (episode 100): 733 days.

That means that if you listened to episode 1 and episode 100 when they were released, and all other 98 episodes in between, then you spent about 0.4937% of your time listening to us.

If you discovered us later and listened to each episode released since, then you can guess that you spent an approximately similar proportion since the episode lengths haven’t changed markedly. If you discovered us later and went back through the back catalogue, of course, the proportion of your time you have spent on the Math/Maths Podcast since you started listening is even greater.

So if you’re a regular listener then we can say that you spend nearly one half of one percent of your time listening to Samuel and I ramble on about mathematics news. (Equivalently, nearly one half of one percent of my time is spent talking to Samuel!)

Depressing thought, eh?

(P.S. Of course, we’re nothing special. Anything that you do every week that takes one hour is consuming 0.6% of your available time. It shouldn’t be, but somehow seeing it spelled out like this seems surprising. I hope we’re worth it!)

(P.P.S. my time token analogy at the start of this post doesn’t work, of course, if you do anything else at all while listening. Shhh!)