Nicknames for someone named Stuart or Stewart

I don’t know anyone named Stewart or Stuart, but the internet hasn’t done a very good job on the Stewart Nickname front so far, so here are several for all types of Stus.

Alliterative, mean:

• Stupid Stu
• Stinky Stuart
• Stressful Stu
• Stalker Stu

Alliterative, nice:

• Studly Stu
• Stunning Stu
• Stainless Stuart

Food based, mean:

• Chicken Stu
• Cold Stu
• Bouillabaisse (Fishy Stu)
• Dinuguan (Awful/Offal Stu)
• Lecso (Hungry/Hungary Stu)
• Cassoulet (Porky Stu)

Food based, nice:

• Sweet and Savory Stu
• Gaphama (Pumpkin Stu)
• Birria (Spicy Stu)

Food based, ethnicity Specific:

• Irish Stu
• Cholent (Jewish Stu)
• Kahdi (Indian Stu)

Only works for Stewart, mean:

• ‘Wart

For gifted athletes, nice:

• Kordell Stewart

Source: List of Stews

crosshatch/diametrical pizza debate update

You might recall that last year, shortly after moving to Columbus, I was perplexed by the manner in which much of the pizza was sliced here.  I had grown up with circluar pizzas cut through their diameters, forming eight or so wedge-shaped slices that are more or less identical.

But here, there is a tendency to make a series of parallel and perpendicular cuts, leaving several rectangles of crustless pizza, and several partially rectangular and partially circular slices that did have crust.

I was initially dismissive of this crosshatching of pizza, because why wouldn’t you want crust on your slice?  But I have been confronted with scenario in which this questionable slicing method was advantageous.

If you are hosting a party in which you are in charge of ordering pizza and order much too much, and are still eating pizza for every meal five days later, the crust gets awfully stale while the crustless slices are still just as good as they were the next day.

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In response to my last post—which put forth the hypothesis that I’d be more popular on the internet if the internet saw more pictures of me—Annotations suggested that the cheeseballs in the accompanying picture “might be the true independent variable”.

Although that’s maybe some sloppy statistics language, Annotations has a point.  After all, that was indeed the first cheeseball-related post I have made, so who isn’t to say the relative popularity of my previous post was based solely on the cheeseball content?  Perhaps my face has a negative effect, and a cheeseball post without any pictures of me would have been even more popular.

So in the spirit of scientific inquiry, above is a diagram from a 1939 patent for A Process For Preparing Foods, a process which wikpedia suggests may have produced the grandfather of the modern day cheeseball. It should be noted that there is a competing claim to the cheeseball’s ancestry.

The above is a “chart” from Esquire regarding women’s preferences for performing oral sex, but I don’t have anything to say about blowjobs.  This is about how horrible the above image is, having nothing to do with popsicles or oral sex.

The above image—which I discovered in this pleasant Slate post about remarkably similar popsicle on blue background photographs being used in J Crew ads and a memoir about someone’s mother dying—is one of the worst things made to look like a chart I have seen.  At first look, it seems to be quite a clever bar graph—the way their “Do you practice safe sex?” chart does (that one is roughly to scale).

But a slightly closer look reveals the lengths of the popsicle bears absolutely no relation to the numbers they are being associated with.  30%, you may know, is greater than 19%, despite there being more popsicle on 19%.  So maybe, one would think, the scale is just reversed?  That’d be a pretty goofy thing to do in this case, but flipped scales are not unheard of in graphing.  But, that is not the case, because 30% is less than 46%, but “I Like It Because He Likes It” has more popsicle than the empty “I Love It”.

It’s tough for me to admit how angry these types of things can make me.  Of all the things I could be a snob about, I ended up with charts.  Could be worse, I suppose.

But the major takeaway is that there is obviously a glaring deficiency in statistical literacy at Esquire and we should be very suspicious of the bulk of the findings in their Survey Of American Women (from whence this chart and it’s unrelated data came).

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The Snickers Ice Cream Cone

Lucky Charms consumption behavior is supposed to divide people into two groups: those who are left with only marshmallow bits and those who are left with only toasted oat-based pieces.  This is too coarse of a distinction, and it fails to capture the way I would eat a bowl of Lucky Charms: judiciously adjusting the composition so that the proportion of marshmallow bits to total bits and pieces increase smoothly and near-linearly.  This meant that eating Lucky Charms (and actually, they were more likely Marshmallow Blasted Froot Loops) required a level of concentration it probably didn’t deserve.

This is to say, I can appreciate the constraints of an ice cream cone.  Start at the top, go to the bottom.  No need to think.  Just need to eat.  But, problematically, the ice cream is better than the cone, yet the proportion of cone increases as you consume your dessert.  So your best bites are at the beginning, and they just get worse from there.

The Snickers Ice Cream Cone, however, is a feat of design on par with the Eiffel Tower.  While tastiness of current bite increases and decreases depending on your position, average tastiness of remaining bites peaks right before the end.  The caramel spine is the axis on which the deliciousness pivots, and that chunk of chocolate at the bottom facilitates this remarkable bite right before you finish where caramel, chocolate, ice cream, and cone combine in a ratio whose mathematical properties need to be examined more closely.  It’s a really important bite and I’m a pretty big fan of Snickers Ice Cream Cones.

I made a pretty big discovery at the supermarket today: E.L. Fudge Original (henceforth ELF-1) and E.L. Fudge Double Stuffed (ELF-2) sell for the same price at the supermarket.  My first thought was that the fudge stuffing must be both free to produce and completely weightless.  I quickly discovered that the ELF-1 package actually weighed more than the ELF-2 package, suggesting that the fudge was not weightless but rather some sort of anti-gravity substance that caused the package to weigh less.

It wasn’t until I got home, and opened and carefully examined my newly-purchased ELF-1 and ELF-2 packages, that I understood that there were actually more ELF-1 cookies in their package than ELF-2s in theirs.  Assuming there is indeed twice as much fudge stuffing in an ELF-2* and that the shortbread portions of the cookie weigh the same in ELF-1 and ELF-2, some very basic linear algebra will show that rather than having negative weight, a unit of fudge stuffing weighs 1.42 grams.

As far as the the price of producing the fudge stuffing: given the equality of the prices of the packages, my calculation is that the elves can produce 2 units of fudge per single piece of shortbread (there are two shortbread pieces per cookie).  Of course, that is only if the price is supply-driven.  More likely, it is demand-driven: if the prices ELF-1 and ELF-2 diverged, demand for whichever was cheaper would increase so heavily that it would preclude the feasibility of producing both versions.

The other fascinating bit of data in the above table: the number of calories in an ELF-1 is the same as in an ELF-2.  I don’t know enough about food to make any sense of this, but it might be evidence that the shortbread portions of ELF-1 and ELF-2 are actually different. Otherwise the fudge would have to be calorie-less while still contributing fat.

Previous posts: choosing which side of the street to buy your chicken wings from based on how many you want, E.L. Fudgehenge

*Allison has done some (methodologically questionable) research on the related question of “Is there twice as much stuffing in Double Stuf Oreo than in a regular Oreo?” and concluded there was not.

Recommendations

1. Super Meat Boy.  This is the best video game I’ve played in some time.  I was reluctant to play a game in which “meat boy” rescues “bandage girl” from “dr fetus”, but meat boy being made of meat is as incidental as Mario being a plumber.  It’s really just excellent fun, and it only cost me $10.  If you own an xbox, download this immediately.  It’s coming out for the wii as well.
2. Sauerkraut as a pizza topping.  This discovery was like the twist of a good spy thriller: after you’re made aware of it, everything makes perfect sense.  Of course sauerkraut is a great pizza topping.  I’m just bummed it took me this long to understand it was even a possibility.  If you are still not sold: envision a pizza topped with sausage, sauerkraut, and lots of crush pepper flakes.  Meanwhile, pizzas in my new city seem to be cut into a cross pattern, making squares and other rectangle-like shapes, rather than the diametrical manner that results in wedges.  This leaves several slices crustless, and seems like a big mistake.  It feels wrong to call them “slices”, although I understand that “slice” conveys nothing about shape.  Still, a “slice” with sauerkraut but not crust may be better than a slice with crust but not sauerkraut.
3. This cover of R. Kelly’s I Wish by How To Dress Well that I discovered because of barthel.  It led me to get both the How To Dress Well album and TP-2.com, two very welcome additions to the ipod.

I have big plans for those pickles

I jarred them last week with my aunt, who has been making them with the same recipe for at least forty years.  These pickles were the staple of all family gatherings.  These pickles were the best part of most of those gatherings too (which speaks only to the quality of the pickles—my family is totally better than yours).  I wrote my personal essay for my college applications about these pickles and was accepted by some pretty good schools.  These pickles are important to me, is what I’m saying.  And last week I learned how to make them, and now I can have pickles any time I want them—with a ten day wait for fermentation.

Back in March, my brother returned to DC from a weekend in New York, extolling the virtues of something called a Pickle Back, a shot of whiskey chased with a shot of pickle juice.  Pickle backs are excellent, and I have spent the last several months proselytizing them, with scores of converts.  I strongly recommend that if you currently have the ingredients in whatever building you are in, you should stop reading and just go try it.  The quality of a pickle back depends more on the quality of the pickle juice than the quality of the whiskey, and so I needed to start making excellent pickles.

I have a friend getting married this weekend.  Their gift from me involves a jar of these pickles and a bottle of whiskey.  I am also bringing a bottle and jar for my hosts.  But more than being nice to friends I already have, pickle backs are pretty much my only plan to make friends when I start grad school in a month.

I don’t own any furniture, I don’t know any linguistics, but I’ll have several jars of pickles, so I’m totally prepared.

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Of course, the most obvious use of time travel is to see concerts, but an overlooked application for it is with fermentation processes.  I think when you pitch it to the investors with the time machines, you sell the benefits of making 60-year-old Scotch in an afternoon, but, right now, I really just need it to be ten days into the future.