TS PMO: Places You Shouldn't Be

Humor

There’s a lot of places around campus that no one has any reason to be at. However, the Google Maps algorithm somehow manages to place them all near the top of whatever category you select.

SuzieCakes

Perhaps you wanted to get your friend a birthday cake, and so you look up “cake” on Google Maps, and so you go to SuzieCakes to buy a big one but it’s $90 dollars (with tax and other fees).

Nine-inch cake for $90 dollars??? At that point, I’d rather just spend it all on chicken nuggets.

Chicken Nuggets: An Order-of-Magnitude Calculation

If 40 chicken nuggets cost $15 dollars, then with $90 dollars we can get 240 chicken nuggets from McDonald’s instead of a mid birthday cake. If there were 20 people, then everyone could enjoy about 12 pieces on average.

That sounds like a hell of a good time.

Or, if we wanted to buy some organic frozen nuggets and bake them, just spend the 90 bucks and buy a few bags from Trader Joe’s. If each bag is worth $5, then with tax you could probably buy 16 bags (half of few times 10). Note that few is a number that’s approximately 3.14, I think? And few² is equal to 10, roughly.

Since it’s a few hundred grams per bag, 20 grams per nugget, so do some division to get that there are (few/2 times 10 nuggets) in each bag.

Then multiply the nuggets per bag by (few/2 times 10 bags) is (few²/4 hundred nuggets), which is 1000/4 due to the aforementioned property of few².

So, you can buy approximately 250 nuggets. Split them and put them into various ovens to bake.

Ultimately, you could get a LOT of chicken nuggets for 90 bucks.

Fantastic Sams

… is a hair salon with cheap prices, but there are only a few reasons you would go there:

  1. You couldn’t be bothered to look at any of the salons outside of walking distance
  2. You have some great friends (enemies) who told you it’s a good place to get a haircut
  3. You are a masochist (not unusual at this school)

There are numerous occasions in which I have seen a horrendous haircut on a friend and asked where they got it, and a surprising majority of the time, they said Fantastic Sams.

Does that mean that Fantastic Sams is always bad? No. Is my sample biased? Probably.

People mistakenly make 80% of their decisions based on 20% of the things they see, but if 80% of the bad haircuts I see are from the same hair salon, maybe I should go there 20% of the time?

After my first bad haircut in freshman year, I asked my friend who always has great haircuts where he gets his, and he said some place far away that costs at least a Benjamin. I’d prefer somewhere more affordable, like the Shaolin Temple. I heard they also feed you organic, washed vegetables there (the house dinner bok choy from a few weeks ago had dirt in it, by the way), but I don’t think they’ll have Wi-Fi when I get my haircut, so maybe not.

Like a dog always goes back to eating its own feces, I went back to Fantasstic for my second haircut a few months later, just to see if it would be any different.

![][image1] Saitama from the anime One Punch Man*, who is immune to bad hair days.* (Credit: Madhouse & Tom Zhang)

From the results of the random sample and a P-value of 1 > 0.05, I fail to reject the null hypothesis that a haircut from Fantastic Sams is always Fantasstic.