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By Hank Campbell | August 19th 2009 05:17 PM | 12 comments | Print | E-mail | Track Comments
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About Hank Campbell

A wise man once said Darwin had the greatest idea anyone ever had. Others may prefer Newton or Archimedes.

Probably no one ever said a website was the greatest idea anyone ever had, but a website... Full Bio

I bought a pizza for the office today.  Don't get all excited and start thinking I am some aging hipster commie pinko, I am not.   I am just smart enough to make sure that in return for people enduring my jokes I  make sure they periodically get fed.   It's not like they can buy food with what I pay them.

So that everyone would appreciate how magnanimous I am for dropping $5 on a Little Caesar's pizza, I wrote on my Faceyspaces and Tweetypages (what, you don't follow me on Faceypages and Tweetyspaces?  Here and here) ...
Just bought pizza for the office. 74% of the time I get pizza on my shirt at an average 1:45 time. Anyone willing to bet an over-under?

No one but me seemed to know what an over-under actually was, Christina Znidarsic even tried to game the odds by picking a number 3 times the figure I used as the average, but a gentleman named Mike Drippe' Sr. replied:
The propensity for food to magnetically be attracted to and get on my shirt is directly proportional to the contrast in color and value between my shirt and the food in question. It is a physical law more predictable than general relativity.

Hmmmm.

Obviously he was joking ... a little.  But jokes are funny because they parallel real life and there probably was something to the idea that you are more likely to have an accident if you're wearing clothes that would make it more noticeable.  Of course, it could also be a simple psychology issue where you are instead more likely to just remember the expensive mistakes.

There's only one way to find out.  Unfortunately this is one instance where science cannot help.  I can't buy pizza every day for enough people to get a 95% confidence interval so I had to rely on something that requires no evidence and less than 15 minutes of time to get an official sounding answer - math.

Here's what I came up with.

Outcome:

Sp = Pizza Spillage.

Factors:

Br = Brightness of the shirt, on a scale.  1 being clothes the color of mulch that you wear after 5 years of marriage and 5 being the bright yellow shirt I am wearing today.
Dx = How accident prone you are, on a scale.   1 being every cop with a cup of coffee in every movie that has a cop and a remotely comedic plotline and 10 being that Sully guy who landed an airplane in the Hudson river without spilling his drink.
Pa = Pattern.  Does the shirt have a fancy pattern on it or is it really expensive? 1 for yes, 0 for no.
Re = Are you eating in a recliner?  I have one in my office because it's where I do my most serious work, like napping after pizza.  1 for yes, 0 for no.
Hank scientific blogging office

Pe = Pepperoni.  1 for yes, 0 for no.
Sa = Sausage.  1 for yes,  0 for no.
Piz = number of slices you will have eaten, inclusive.

Doing some of my usual brilliance, I came up with 



If Sp >1, you shouldn't eat the pizza.

My score ... a Brightness 5 with a Dexterity 7, a Pattern, a Recliner, Pepperoni on the pizza and 2 slices means I got a .93 today, so I should be okay.

How about you?

Comments

This is the only way to approach the pizza spilling problem - with equations! Excellent piece of science, Hank! :-)

Totally falsificationable too!

Kristina Gorgevich's picture
1.67.  I shouldn't have eaten the pizza.  :/

Hank's picture
Well, I once saw you get a milkshake in your hair while drinking it through a straw, which I am pretty sure violated Newton.  Or Bernoulli.  Anyway, someone really, really smart got his law and/or principle violated, so I am not surprised.

Kristina Gorgevich's picture
Well, in my defense, I think the equation is lacking a multitasking variable.  If multitasking, add .98 to Sp.  

Andrea Kuszewski's picture
That is the most nerdtastic approach to eating pizza I have ever seen! However, I wonder if you considered other factors that might confound the results such as:
  1. level of hunger (low blood sugar levels may cause shakiness, thus decrease dexterity)
  2. presence of distractors (talking to people, watching TV, TWE- "tweeting while eating")
  3. And of course, those psychological components that affect the robustness of a study like the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy and the Subject-Expectancy Effect.

However...... I am most impressed by the creative statistical analysis of pizza consumption. By the way, was it tasty?

Hank's picture
I did not consider these because ...

1.  I never have low blood sugar.   When I get hungry my sugar knows it had better slow the heck down.

2.  Bloggy is usually busy getting into mischief while I eat, so we do not talk.  Here he is, busted for playing with scissors even though I have told him a dozen times not to do that.  He runs around the swimming pool with them to impress girls.
Bloggy scissors

3. No, I have a Nobel prize in Awesome and I am never wrong.

P.S.  It tasted like cardboard dipped in Spaghettios.   For $5, you don't get brilliance.

Stellare's picture
Aaaaww! Bloggy is SO CUTE!
He can do what he wants - he's Bloggy. And look! No pizza stains...a mathematical miracle?!?

Christina Znidarsic's picture
Oh man.  I win the Lame Brain award for somehow thinking that "1:45" stood for 1 hour and 45 minutes.  No idea why my brain embraced that figure. 

gospel_virus's picture
I think this is golden - I scored .6667, and I didn't spill any of that pizza, so I think you're on to something here, Hank.

Hank's picture
That's all the confidence interval I need!

adaptivecomplexity's picture
So, what was the result? Was your equation predictive? I think you need to start keeping a record of how predictive your equations are vs. Garth's. When you start to beat him, call up the Today Show.

Hank,
Brilliantly Funny! I stumbled upon by accident. What can you come up with for ' stumbling on brilliant Funnies' ?
Thanks,
Christine K.

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