Potlatch Bus

So, if you were taking a VW bus from Pittsburgh to Seattle would it be best to run on bourbon or beer?

Below I complied some data on the energy in different types of alcohol.  I think it is interesting that the calories per mL does not follow the energy content as expressed by calories per mL, but that is probably because only a few calories come from the alcohol. In order to estimate the amount of fuel needed I found that Audi has an E100 vechicle that gets 25 mpg. I then based my calculations on a 350 mile trip.  On the last column I tried to take into account that the MPG will change with driving as you loose some of the significant fuel weight for the low alcohol (mpg model form Stat Crunch), but that gives very different results due to having a much higher starting mpg in the regression model.
So it looks like Franzia is the best solution!

Rasin Box Stamping

I've been eating rasins as a snack lately, and was fidgiting with a box last night.  I took it apart, and saw that it was a really strange shape outline.  So why did they pick that shape?  I was thinking that maybe the curves would allow fit intricately within each other. 

I took a picture of the box, did a vector clipping mask the image in Photoshop, and then exported the shape to Illustrator.  In Illustrator I played around with different configurations, comming up three possible stamping patterns.  I bounded each repeating unit by a rectangle, and since each outline was the same size I could get a measure of the waste by simply dividing the area of the bounding unit by the number of shapes it contains, and called it rectangle area per box.

 I tried to fit the another row into the space of the second box in the above.  That reduced the rectangle area per box by 700 pixels.

Turns out the simplest stamping pattern minimizes the waste, and that the curves are probably there just to make the construction of the box easier.  That was disapointing.