The post where Brandon does the math for me*
Me, about to add a few extra pounds to my calculations
You might fondly recall yesterday’s post, which contained the following bon mot**:
So if I average 15,000 miles a year driving, and I pay, say, $3.50 per gallon, and then I increase my car’s MPG from 28 to 29, that means I’ll save $[god, my math skills really blow… someone do the math for me?]… a lot of money.
Shortly after posting that, loyal reader† Brandon sent me the following cantankerous welcome missive:
By increasing your cars MPG rating by 1 MPG, you would save 18.47 gallons over 15,000 miles. This equals $64.66 in annual savings. You would probably spend more purchasing special dieting stuff to lose the 25 lbs.. but you would probably live longer!
By the way, you’re welcome.
Let’s take a quick further look at those calculations. If you take that $64.66 per chubby person and apply it to the 1/3 of Americans who are overweight (all of whom, presumably, need to be carted around by auto or bus), you end up with a cost savings of about $6.5 billion. To put that in perspective, the annual budget of the National Cancer Institute - the principal agency for cancer research in the U.S. - is $4.9 billion.
Sobering thought, no?
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*Readers of this blog know of my obsessive love of music, but seriously, I can’t think of any songs about a guy named Brandon, or math… from which we can infer that the average heavy-metal band avoids writing songs about (a) guys, especially those with strong math skills, and (b) math. So, sadly, no musical reference tied to this blog post. I did, briefly, consider trying to work in a reference to Tommy Tutone’s immortal “867-5309/Jenny,” since 867-5309 is technically “math,” but that would have taken a lot of work, and I haven’t had my morning cup of coffee yet.
**Come to think of it, I could have made a pretty cool musical reference here (again, had I had my cup of coffee). Think about it… Bon mot… Bon Scott, AC/DC’s first singer… presto, I’ve opened up a world of possibilities, based on all those great early AC/DC songs. Damn you, lack of caffeine.
† Yes, I’m as surprised as you are to find that I have loyal readers. Well, other than my wife’s cats, and I guess they don’t really count, because I have to read my posts to them. And honestly, even they wouldn’t count if they could figure out how to cover their ears with their paws without falling face-first into the carpet. (It’s rough being a quadruped sometimes.)
