Just how far did Tim Robbins tunnel in The Shawshank Redemption anyway?
Adapted from a Stephen King short story and originally released in 1994 to a middling reception, Frank Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemption currently tops the IMDB’s Top 250 and is probably playing on TNT right this minute. The whole world now knows how wrongfully accused Andy Dufresne (a never-more-earnest Tim Robbins), “crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side,” and how it took him 17 long years to do it. But how much tunneling did Robbins’ character do during those 17 years in Shawshank? New York graphic designer and “front end hacker” Shahed Syed, known online as dehahs, decided to apply some good old-fashioned mathematics to the situation. The result of his labor is a gorgeous infographic called The Shawshank Computation. Here, Syed spells out his charmingly nerdy premise: “Just how long was the tunnel that Andy dug out? Let’s find out with known dimensions and the power of mathematics.”