Re: Household Algebra

On 5/1/24 7:38 PM, Joy Beeson wrote:

 On another forum, I remarked that I frequently use high-school algebra
in my sewing.  Tonight I need it for cooking -- I forgot to buy baking
chocolate, but I have nine .88-ounce bars of 85% eating chocolate, and
need four ounces to make a cake.
 I think I'm gonna need a calculator.
 Or, perhaps, I could just put them all in:
   .88 x 9 x .85 = 7.92 x .85 = 6.732
 Sanity check:  .85 x .88 = .748 oz/bar, three-fourths of nine is six
and three fourths.
 I usually put all four ounces into half a recipe, but this year I'm
making a whole cake, so half again too much is going to be rather
feeble chocolate.
 I'd better make sure I have four eggs.
  I did check that I have a cup of pecans.

I can remember figuring out what proportions of evaporated milk and non-fat milk I needed to get the equivalent of whole milk.
I also use Diophantine equations to figure out how to apportion the cost of a $5 bag of books and DVDs to the individual items (which I admit may be a bit obsessive).
--
Evelyn C. Leeper, http://leepers.us/evelyn, @eleeper@mastodon.social
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick
themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.
--Sir Winston Churchill