Great thoughts of Fleeting substance

A nice week, and a nice weekend, but really not that much to write about. The one notable, neat piece of information is that I got my *grades* this week, and got and A- in Pattern recognition and an A in Adaptive Signal Processing, both of which are awesome, and both of which are higher than I was expecting.

I’ve also started work on my summer class, which promises to be *much* easier than last semester. Much, much much. Good for that. Very good.

And then, of course, there was a four day weekend, because I work extra so that I get every other Friday off, and that means a lot of relaxing for yours truly. Nothing too amazing though.

So in lieu of intriguing personal anecdotes…storytime.

* * * *

I’ve mentioned my rebellions against my parents food choices before, but it’s not all reactionary. As a youth I was always jealous of my friends who got white bread PB&J in their lunches, while I was always stuck with some sort of wheat bread. White bread was so cool! It was so sweet as to be almost powdered sugar, and really only functioned as a delivery system to get the sweet jelly and sticky peanut butter into your mouth. And who hasn’t, at some point, taken a slice or three of white bread and crushed it into a square that you could eat all in one bite. That’s about as close as a 5-year-old can get to a feeling of *real power*, and it’s probably where they got the carbo-loading idea for Powerbars. They’re probably just bars of compressed white bread.

But I never got that kinda bread. I got icky, nasty, wheat bread. Blech. It always had seeds, and bitey bits, and it got in the way of my enjoyment of raw PB&J. As a matter of fact, I don’t think we ever bought white bread…which makes me wonder where I ever ate it…probably in some school lunch somewhere.

So you’d expect this story to continue about my rebellion in college and how I ate nothing but PB&J on white bread for my entire freshman year, but you’d be wrong.

As I developed a taste for bread, and I mean *real* bread, not nappylame fakestuff, I never really got into the whole wonderbread phenomenon. It was too flat, too boring, to lame. Besides, I could flatten an entire loaf into two slices that I could use on a single sandwich, and that’s just not good economics. As time has worn on, I’ve become fans of granier and granier breads. It’s good stuff.

But I’ve run into a problem. Orowheat, once bane of my childhood lunches, has found a way to lure me into a deep spiral of confusion from which there is no escape.

When I was young, the Magnum Opus of our bread consumption was Orowheat ‘7-Grain’. I still like it a lot. It’s got body, and fullness, and a good nutty crunch. But since I’ve been shopping on my own, they’ve come up with a new bread. ’13-Grain’. Now obviously, 13 grains are better than 7 grains by about…well…about 5. So that’s an easy choice to make, go with the grainer ones.

But there’s a new bread in town. And it’s thrown off the whole equation. The ever-nebulous ‘multi-grain’.

Now multi-grain could mean anything. Any number from 2 to an INFINITE number of grains. There’s no way to know! No way at all. Casual observation gives the look of a few salient grains right off the bat, so it’s not like they’re cheating us low, but the question of ‘the grainiest bread’ is now up for debate. And there’s no way to resolve the question. I could calculated the expected value of the number of grains (engineer humor) but I don’t know anything about the underlying Probability Density Function, not a thing. There’s not even any way to be sure that the number of grains are consistent across loafs…I may be dealing with a nonstationary function of the number of grains. Suddenly we’re into some pretty deep math, here.

Now I’ve run some initial calculations, and I’m roughly 38.2% certain that Multigrain is not more grainy than 13 grain, but that’s assuming a Gaussian distribution of grain numbers with stationary statistics, and there’s no way to prove that.

For now, I’m just sticking with the 13 grain for the most part, only picking up Multigrain to build on my statistical knowledge of the grain statistics, and I only do this because I got kicked out of Ralphs for opening up all the Multigrain loafs and trying to count the individual grains over enough slices to get a significant sample space. They’ve let me back in, but I have to go through the bread aisle under escort. I’m thinking about writing Orowheat themselves to see if they know, and if they’re willing to tell, but I’m guessing it’s probably proprietary information. I may have to break in to corporate headquarters and abduct on of their grain engineers, but you didn’t hear that here.

-N

P.S. No, I haven’t done any real studies on the graininess of my bread. I only do engineering when I *have* to these days.