And to show how easy it is to cut out 20% of the meat from your diet, they showed trays with (I think) 16 hamburger patties, cut off half of one patty, and said that if you don't eat that half patty, but still eat the rest, then you've eliminated 20% of the meat from your diet!

Okay, granted - I was not a math major like you, but I don't think that's right.

DH and I have decided to try going vegetarian 2 nights a week to save money. (Semi-vegetarian, anyway - the lentil soup I'm making this weekend will still have pancetta as a flavor base.) We'll see how it goes.

Cool. And that's actually somewhere around 20%.

Oy. Now someone said that his way of being green is that he doesn't use those little ketchup packets at fast food restaurants.

I could wander over to Barnes & Noble and ogle the books...

I've been known to do this to avoid traffic.

Aside from the not-math, I'm gonna have to say I cut more than 20% of the meat from my diet when I stopped eating red meat (in 1987). I don't think another 20% would have much impact.

That's...not math.

It's really not. Not math that won't end up circled in red and having to be redone at least. Unless it's New Math. Does New Math use different numbers than Math Math?

I can't even figure out where they might have gone wrong, or what they actually meant. Weird.

Yeah. The correct answer is about 3% (i.e. they're eliminating 1/32nd).

Yeah, 20% of 16 is around 3. I really don't know what they were trying to say. My next guess was that they were, for some reason, eliminating 20% of the meat on that particular tray -- the patties were divided among three trays -- but that tray had four patties, so 20% of that would be almost a full patty.

That hamburger math made my brain spin.

Now I have to do the math to work out how to only do 40 hours this week. I do this instead of troubleshooting SQL, which makes me a bad person. But I'm not a developer, right? I'm a business analyst.

When I got takeout from this place last time I reflexively tipped 20%. When I checked my bank balance they'd just deducted the meal charge. This time I was closer to 15%, but I still felt awkward when presented with that blank spot on the credit card slip. I'm not sure when I became such a softie.

Apparently the other thing is spaghetti and tomato sauce. Eh. I wanted to do it with bacon and peas, but I have no peas in the freezer! One of the things I like least about having moved: I no longer have all of the things I always have in the house.

We're getting pizza for dinner. I'm not sure if my healing gums can handle tomato sauce yet, so I'm getting one with olive oil, soy cheese, eggplant, and spinach. My parents are getting pepperoni and pineapple or something like that.