Yes, you read that headline right. If you’ve ever wondered how many cans of SpaghettiOs you’d need to write the Lord of the Rings, wonder no more. A dedicated Reddit user put in the work and solved the age-old mystery.
Reddit user u/MyNameGifOreilly set out on what many thought an impossible quest, much like that of the Fellowship in Lord of the Rings. The goal? Find out just how many A to Z SpaghettiOs it would take to write the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, and boy, did he deliver.
In a video that’s gained over 15k upvotes on Reddit, u/MyNameGifOreilly explained his process for finding the answer to this oddly specific (yet very intriguing) question. Check it out below:
(More Than) One Can of SpaghettiOs to Rule Them All…
To find the answer, he first calculated the average distribution of letters in a can of SpaghettiOs. This meant separating and counting every noodle in a few cans. Next, he uploaded the data to a computer program that “converts books to SpaghettiOs.” Then, he cross-referenced that data with the number of letters in the Lord of the Rings trilogy and how often each letter occurred.
Finally, after a bit of math, he got a number.
According to u/MyNameGifOreilly, it would take 8,795 cans of SpaghettiOs to write the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy. This would cost you $12,225.05 and leave you with over 8 million noodles left over.
The comments were nothing short of hilarious.
VIA u/97875
Though, some were understandably upset u/MyNameGifOreilly’s didn’t do what we all initially thought he would do.
But according to a data scientist, this method is much simpler and mathematically sound (where’s the fun in that though?).
Others couldn’t help but crack a few Lord of the Rings-related jokes.
In short, we didn’t know we needed this information, but we’re glad we know it now. For more hilarious bookish content, make sure to keep popping over to Bookstr!