patrick honner

Appreciation

Menu Deconstruction: Spirit Airlines

I love scrutinizing menus. It appeals to me both as a math person and as someone with a long history of food-service employment.

Typically, my favorite menu deconstruction activity is finding inconsistent pricing among the menu items: for example, there are numerous different prices for the value meal upgrade on this Wendy’s menu. On the other hand, this Five Guys’ menu is remarkable for its pricing consistency.

So on a recent Spirit Airlines flight, I grabbed the on-board menu and took a look. Apart from the price-gouging that has become commonplace nowadays (including a $3 charge for water), the menu was relatively uninteresting until I got to the Value Meals.

Conveniently, this Spirit menu shows you exactly how much you save with each Value Meal purchase. While verifying that the numbers were accurate, I noticed something peculiar: three of the four Best Deal Values Meals were entirely comprised of alcohol!

I personally don’t consider 3 beers to be a meal, but maybe this is all part of Spirit’s unconventional business model.

Economics Sports Statistics

Analysis of NBA Finances

This is a comprehensive and insightful look into the NBA’s claims of financial distress from Nate Silver:

https://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/05/calling-foul-on-n-b-a-s-claims-of-financial-distress/

As the NBA prepares to battle the player’s union over revenue, the league has made several public claims about how they have been losing money for years.

Silver takes a deep look into those claims. He crunches the numbers and compares player revenue as a share of league revenue across the four major sports leagues; he looks at salary growth relative to league growth; and he also discusses some of the dubious accounting tricks teams and leagues use to make profits disappear!

As usual from Nate Silver, this is a very interesting and readable application of mathematics and statistics. His conclusion is summed up best by a recent message from @fivethirtyeight on Twitter: “If David Stern really thinks the NBA lost $370 million last season, shouldn’t he have fired himself?”

By patrick honner, 13 years6 years ago

Application

Automatic Origami

This video from New Scientist demonstrates some amazing self-unfolding origami.

https://www.newscientist.com/blogs/nstv/2011/05/micro-origami-unfolds-in-water.html

In the video, a carefully folded-up piece of paper is placed on the surface of the water. As the creases in the paper absorb the water, they start to expand, causing the shape to unfold.

As each subsequent layer unfolds and hits the water, the process repeats, until the shape is completely unfurled. It’s interesting to consider the potential applications of this process. An origami life boat, perhaps?

Yet another amazing way to have fun with folding!

By patrick honner, 13 years6 years ago