A Geek Chooses Lunch
Not so much on programming, but on geekery.
One local lunch spot faxes us a list of daily specials and I decided that I wanted pizza, but the question was whether to choose the $6.25 10" two topping pizza with a 12 ounce soda or split a $9.45 16" one topping pizza with a 2L birch beer. I love birch beer, so that's not a deciding factor.
What I did (and iteratively adjusted it with Elaine) was to normalize the meals into units of price per food, where the food units were square inch-liter-toppings.
So in this case you take the price divided by the area of the pizza x toppings x volume of soda. Ignoring the egregious mixing of metric and English units, this is fairly reasonable. I did the math with a calculator, but for this blog, I popped this into a spread sheet and got the following results, using πr2 for area of the pizza:
The personal 2-topping pizza meal is 10.61 cents/in2-L-topping, whereas the large pizza is 2.35 cents/in2-L-topping. This is normalized, so the value of the larger pizza is clearly greater. In addition, the area of the personal pizza is 78.54 in2, whereas the area of the large pizza is 201.06 in2, therefore my share of the large is greater than the whole small. The soda is similar a better deal.
Rick and I shared a large with Buffalo chicken as the topping and there are left-overs for today. In addition, we answered the trivia question about encephalitis and got free garlic bread sticks. It was a good lunch. And yes, we really are that geeky.