drewdez.com

A Closer Look at a Briefcase of Reese's

Sat, 19 Mar 2016 00:00:00 -0600

In advance of March Madness, Reese’s started airing a commercial featuring an animated briefcase (almost) full of peanut butter cups, with the premise that if your boss won’t let you leave work early to watch the tournament, you should bribe him/her with a briefcase of peanut butter cups.¹ If you haven’t seen the ad, you can watch it below in all its deliciousness.

reese's - briefcase from Jen Hubbard on Vimeo.

As an analytically-minded person and a lover of peanut butter cups, I found that the ad left me with several unanswered questions. The results of my analysis follow.

Original Recipe

The peanut butter cups in the briefcase appear to be arranged in an 8 cup x 5 cup x 4 cup configuration, for a total of 160 cups. This equates to:

16,800 calories (105 per cup): Don’t eat them all in one sitting!
$45.53–79.60 approximate cost ($0.28–0.50 per cup, based on $20.49 for a box of 72 cups at Amazon and $1.99 for a 4-pack at my local CVS): does not include cost of briefcase
7.4 pounds (21 grams per cup): does not include weight of briefcase

Going King Size

Based on personal measurements, a Reese’s peanut butter cup is approximately 1-7/8” in diameter, and 7/16” tall. The diameter, and the 8 cup x 5 cup arrangement would require the interior dimensions of the briefcase to be approximately 15” x 9-3/8” (we’ll get to height next). Based on a quick search of briefcase.com, it appears that a width of 15” is within the reasonable range of briefcase sizes, but a depth of 9-3/8” is probably on the small size relative to the width—8 cups by 6 cups may have been a bit more realistic.

Height is a bit more complicated. First, there appears to be about a cup’s worth of height between the top of the cups and the rim of the briefcase. This implies the height of the bottom portion of the briefcase is equal to that of five peanut butter cups plus the thickness of the bottom of the briefcase—let’s call it 2-3/8”. Second, the lid appears to account for about 30% of total briefcase height, which comes out to just over 1”. This makes the total height of the briefcase about 3-3/8”, which seems to be a reasonable value.

The real upshot here is that the briefcase is only at 57% capacity. As long as the walls of the briefcase are less than 5/32” thick and/or we’re willing to squish our peanut butter cups a tiny bit, we can fit three more entire layers—120 more cups—in the case! Here are some updated stats on the new and improved (and 75% tastier) briefcase of Reese’s:

280 delicious peanut butter cups
29,400 calories
$79.68–139.30 approximate cost
13.0 pounds

A couple of notes on the full briefcase:

Even if the original 160 peanut butter cups was enough for you, it might be worth considering using the extra space, if only because it would help to keep the cups in place while carrying. If you really want to stick with the 160 cups, you could add some padding or find a thinner briefcase.

You’ll want to exercise extra caution when opening the 280-cup briefcase (relative to the 160-cup briefcase), since there are two full layers of cups above the rim of the briefcase.

Avoiding Sticky Situations

Finally a few words of caution:

Do not use a nice briefcase for this, especially if you live in a warm climate, or work in a warm office.
Please make sure your boss doesn’t have a peanut allergy before trying this.

In summary, bribing your boss with a briefcase of peanut butter cups probably isn’t a great idea for any number of reasons, but it sure is fun to think about. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a couple of test subjects that are ready to move from the measurement phase to the consumption phase.

Footnotes

The exact words are “If your boss won’t let you cut out early, try sweetening the deal.” ↩

My First Hackathon

Wed, 10 Jun 2015 00:00:00 -0600

Since I started teaching myself to program, I’ve been intrigued by hackathons. I love the idea of a short intense team competition but I had stayed away, concerned my programming chops might not be up to par. Last November, I decided to bite the bullet and enter the travel-themed HACK@1050 held by Amadeus, figuring that if my programming skills weren’t sufficient, at least my domain knowledge would be useful. As it turns out, my concerns were unfounded—I met some incredibly talented people, had a great time, and was able to contribute to a prize-winning hack, which is detailed in the rest of this post.

Before I go into details, let me set the scene…

Imagine you’re browsing the web, reading a story about an amazing travel destination. You’re overdue for a vacation, and you’ve finally found the perfect place to go. You make a note to yourself to check airfares and hotel rates, but then life gets in the way. Three months later—and even more stressed—you find your note, and immediately regret not following up.

Enter Vamoose—a context-aware Chrome extension that helps you bridge the gap between dreaming and booking travel. With a single click, Vamoose determines what place you’re reading about, and delivers costs for flights, hotels, and rental cars without leaving the page—giving you an idea what it might cost to make your travel dream a reality.

After a brief installation process, Vamoose can be triggered by clicking on the Vamoose button in the Chrome toolbar or by clicking on a Vamoose icon embedded in a Facebook page.

Vamoose toolbar button: When its toolbar button is clicked, Vamoose applies a natural language processing algorithm¹ to determine the location most prominently featured in the text of the current page. If Vamoose is unable to determine a corresponding location, the user is prompted to enter one manually.
Vamoose Facebook icons: When you’re on a Facebook page, Vamoose inserts an airplane icon next to each geotagged post. When one of these icons is clicked, the Vamoose pane is activated with the corresponding location as the destination.

Once a location is determined (regardless of trigger method), Vamoose uses the Google Places API and multiple Amadeus APIs² to retrieve an airfare between your closest major airport and the closest major airport to the destination, hotel and rental car rates at the destination, an estimate of carbon emissions for the corresponding air travel³, and a booking link. This information is then presented in a small overlay.

In an attempt to address the sustainability component of the competition—and to have a little fun—emissions estimates are expressed in terms of Camel Count, with 1 unit of Camel Count equivalent to the average daily CO₂ emissions of one camel⁴. While this might not be the ideal measure of emissions, it’s much more tangible than X kilograms of CO₂. Putting a fun spin on this also draws attention to an aspect of travel that usually goes ignored.

For a more detailed description of Vamoose, check out this blog post from Gillian Morris, one of my teammates.

You can view/download the source for Vamoose on GitHub here. Please excuse the lack of refinement; it was a 24-hour hackathon after all.

Vamoose is written in JavaScript, and uses the AngularJS framework. Other tools used include Readability, Node Natural, the GeoNames.org City Names 1000 dataset, the Google Places API, and multiple Amadeus APIs. The Vamoose team consisted of Matt Duran (undergrad at UMBC), Gillian Morris (co-founder and CEO of the excellent travel app Hitlist), Brian Shaler (freelance developer), Dan Zhang (PhD student at UT-Austin), and me.

Here’s a photo of us collecting the Entrepreneurial Prize as the overall winners!

Footnotes

Vamoose first uses Readability to parse the page content, then uses Node Natural to extract root words, and finally matches the resulting roots with the GeoNames.org City Names 1000 dataset. In cases where more than one location is mentioned, Vamoose chooses the more frequently mentioned location, and in cases where multiple cities share a name, Vamoose chooses the one with the greatest population. ↩
Amadeus APIs used include Flight Inspiration Search, Flight Low Fare Search, Hotel Geo-Search, Car Rental Shopping, CO₂ Emission, and Nearest Relevant Airport. ↩
Emissions estimates are only available for markets with non-stop flights. ↩
Approximately 41 kg per day, according to this article. ↩

Hello, World!

Tue, 19 May 2015 00:00:00 -0600

This is the first post on the drewdez.com blog, where I’m planning to write every week or two on a variety of topics of interest to me, including transportation, technology, programming, sports, and much more. I’ll also be writing about some of the personal projects I’ve been working on, and trying to include some information that might be useful to anyone interested in doing similar things.

That’s all for now, but I hope to see you back here soon!