Some Thoughts

Recently I’ve discovered an immutable law of nature.

Hanger’s Law:
Regardless of how many purchased, the number of available hangers in your closet will converge to 1.

Or, put another way:

There are never enough hangers in your closet.

Why this happens? I don’t know. Where the hangers go? I have no idea, but I imagine they go “hang out” with the disappearing socks from the laundry (sorry about the pun).

I got this fortune in my fortune cookie recently. One of the best ever, it reads:

“Stick to things as they are, distrust novelties”.

Thank you Mr. Cookie-man, I think I will.

Today, I extract one of the thorns from my blogging side, so with out further ado…

Have you ever wondered how many possible combinations of Subway sandwiches there are? To answer that question you must first answer the timeless question of “What is a sandwich?” and “What makes a sandwich distinct from another sandwich?” For example, does adding tomatoes to a simple ham and cheese sandwich qualify it to be intrinsically different? If tomatoes do, what about lettuce, that green, virtually tasteless, paper-shredded topping of mostly water? Is there a ranking among the toppings? What about temperature? Surly a sandwich isn’t a Tuna Melt if it hasn’t been heated.

Obviously there are deep philosophical questions here.

I used to work near a Subway store. I probably ate there three to four times a week. Usually just getting the daily specials, or figuring out ways to save some money, like the hidden vegetarian sandwich. I got to know the workers by name and all was bright and happy, until they took away the stamps. But this post isn’t about the demise of a wonderful incentive program, this is about math and numbers.

What would be a close approximation for the number of combinations of sandwiches at your neighborhood Subway?

So not to beat around the bush any longer:

There are 682,518,380,544 combinations at my local Subway store.

In case you are going to write out a check and send it to me that number is: six hundred and eighty-two billion, five hundred and eighteen million, three hundred and eighty thousand, five hundred and forty-four!

The equation used is:

b * c * s * m * t * p = Number of Combinations

Where:
b = breads, c = cheeses, s = sauces, m = meats, t = toppings, p = spices

or more specifically (see Table 1):

b = 6
c = (6 Choose 1) + 1 = 7
s = (12 Choose 3) + 1 = 221
m = (16 Choose 3) + 1 = 561
t = ∑ (13 Choose xi) = 8192, where m = 0, n = 13, assuming capital sigma notation.
p = ∑ (4 Choose xi) = 16, where m = 0, n = 4, assuming capital sigma notation.

Note: The “Choose” function here is a probability function (nCr) that chooses “r” items from “n” choices.
The “+1” on c, s, and m is just taking into account the fact that some one could choose NO cheese, sauce, or meat respectively. “t” and “m” don’t need the “+1” because that is taken into account by setting m = 0, since (X Choose 0) will always equal 1.

So this calculation also places some limits on how big the sandwich can be. No sandwich can have more than 3 types of meat, and 3 types of sauces. A sandwich must have some kind of bread (Sorry Dr. Atkins), and only 1 kind of cheese. A sandwich can go nuts with the toppings and spices though.

I own a cool Coldplay CD. I like its catchy lyrics and also since most of the songs sound similar, it doesn’t matter which song I listen to. Which is good because iTunes LOVES playing songs from that CD (X&Y) for some reason. It seems like every 3rd song is Coldplay. I’m sure it is a nefarious Apple plot to take over the world.

A few months ago I switched yet again to a different cell phone provider. I went back to T-Mobile, and was intrigued by their T-Mobile at Home service. You know the one where the phone hooks into your broadband connection and then all subsequent continental U.S. calls are free (after paying them a monthly fee of course).
Anyway, I got the service which works pretty well. The sound quality is normal, and I haven’t experienced any delay in the conversation while talking. Only every now and then does the phone act strange, like refuse to dial, and once in a great while it even crashes in the middle of a conversation. I’ll put up with these little annoyances as long as they don’t happen too frequently, but can’t live without my Mac synchronizing via bluetooth with address book.

Luckily, there is a nice site dedicated to hacking your mobile phone to work with Apple’s iSync:

http://en.isync-hilfe.de/faq-blog.html

It didn’t take long to get it working, and I even made a little graphic for my phone so it looks better in iSync.

It was pretty easy to get set up. I just followed the instructions on the isync-hilfe.de site for the Nokia phone and it worked the first try. iSync will say that the synchronization didn’t work but your phone will know better and everything will come through just fine.

Feel free to use the graphic I made, as long as it not for commercial purposes.

Today was a great day to go hiking. The smog that beset Salt Lake earlier this week had rolled away and tonight was a good night to go on a short hike. I hiked up behind Shriner’s hospital along the Bonneville Shorline Trail.

Listening to: …Nature…

Perhaps it’s the kid in me, perhaps it’s the weather, perhaps it’s finals, but I’ve got spring fever. It happens every year and every year I get the urge to walk around barefoot and toughen up my feet like I used to do when I WAS a kid. I remember the tough calluses that would form after a fun summer outside. So I guess this is my little way of capturing the wonder years of growing up without buy an XBox 360.

But who would want to play a video game when you’ve got the great outdoors and this great weather. So far, I’ve got a trip planned to the Subway in Zion, and I’m taking a class called “Pioneer Trails” in the summer, where we basically will go camping for credit.

Life is Good…

Salt Lake has been inundated with fresh batch of snow today, and while leaving my apartment to go running at Liberty Park it had just started up again. I thought for a moment to not go, but only for a moment. By the time I got down there the sun was burning through the clouds and illuminating the thousands upon thousands of snowflakes falling in the park. That, combined with the trees heavy with snow made for quite a beautiful and exhilarating run. Oh, and just in case you are wondering, one lap around the Liberty Park running trail is about 1.45 miles.

Oh, and ultimate frisbee last Monday in the snow was pretty awesome as well.

Listening to the Cranberries.

I’ve wanted to post this one for quite a while so I’m giving it a date of January even though it really should of been posted back in ‘06.

At the pharmacy Christmas party we gave out the “Walker Texas Ranger Excellence Award”, which consists of a fairly large brass candle stick holder. I got the idea for the award after using the candle stick holder in various pranks around in the pharmacy. We voted for the employee who best embodies the qualities of the character Walker Texas Ranger. Of course many people could of won the award but this year it went to a guy named Matt, who has basically never missed a day of work in 5 years. Anyway, we WERE going to get a signed picture of Chuck Norris to hang up in the compounding lab, but unfortunately those things cost around $114. I’ll settle for the unsigned copy.

Ok, so back to all things Chuck Norris. I’ve been a fan of the Chuck Norris Facts, for a while now, that have circulated the internet. (As a side note: I’m pretty sure that Conan O’Brian catalyzed the whole thing with his Chuck Norris Lever). So back in August of aught six I added around 50 of the best Chuck Norris facts I could find and had them popup pseudo-randomly in the message section of compounding database program that we use at the pharmacy. I surprised the users and it was a pretty big hit, or was it a roundhouse kick, I forget.

So I’ll go out on a limb here and claim the World Wide Gloating Privilege of being the first person to put Chuck Norris Facts into a unrelated software program. Go ahead and prove that you beat me to it!

About two months ago my cable provider (rhymes with Bombast) sent me their “Cable Television Subscriber Privacy Notice”. Normally I just briefly scan it before filing (throwing) it away, but there was a paragraph, titled “Where and when can I see my personally identifiable information?”, which caught my attention. In short, I can make an appointment with my local office to see the personally identifiable information they have on me. I’ve been calling for over a month to make that appointment, and finally got a hold of the right person. She told me that I was the first person to ask about this.

As of right now, she still can’t find the pamphlet they sent out, but I gave her the document name and number. So now I am just expecting a call to set up the appointment. I’ll keep you posted.