do you know where your towel is?
I just received an email telling me someone has commented on the one video I’ve ever posted to YouTube (being the conclusive cake-cutting in the Scissors vs Pizza Wheel experiments).
This guy calls me a ‘jerk-ass’ for not using a knife. I think he’s missed the point.
Plus, what stupid insult. The jerk-ass.
[See here for the video in question.]
I subscribe to the xkcd comic strip* on RSS and it can be pretty amusing on occasion. Well, amusing for a maths/science/computer geek like me…
Anyway, I enjoyed today’s comic very much. I’ve been saying this all along.
*(it’s the only comic amongst a bunch of intelligent, cultured and generally highbrow media feeding into my Google Reader account, natch)
One Monday evening a couple of weeks ago I returned home late from work wanting something quick and easy for dinner, so I slung a pizza in the oven. At this point I realised I’d bought the wrong pizza. I’d stopped off at a Morrison’s on the way home from a client a day or two before and bought what I’d believed to be a jolly nice pepperoni job. It was a fresh one, and said “Italian Style Stonebaked Pizza” on the box above a picture that looked itself good enough to eat (come to think of it, this might not have been such a bad idea).
Anyway, I removed it from its packaging to find this:
What kind of a disgraceful excuse for a pizza is this? There is a distinct lack of topping of any kind - what there is consists of about three square inches of spectacularly thinly dolloped tomato sauce, four shavings of rather bland cheese and ten slices of pepperoni. While they’ve been easily the most generous with this last ingredient there’s not an embarassing amount of it and what has been provided is somewhat unevenly spread. I hardly need add that I grated about half a loaf of my very own cheddar before throwing it in to cook.
On another, sadder note, the famous Scissors have bitten the dust. This happened a few days before the aforementioned pizza incident, and so I had to use the Pizza Cutter to slice this one up. Which was probably a good thing since to ask the Scissors to cut food as shoddy as that would have been downright indecent. So here’s to an old friend: you did us proud.
Well, the results of our investigation are in. After the long hours of hard work and painstaking research, we have a winner. And there’s a video at the end.
For full details and post-investigation analysis, go to the Scissors vs Pizza Wheel pages.
If you have any questions about this investigation or want help in understanding the results, please post a comment here!
This is the ultimate question: Which is better at cutting foodstuffs, your ordinary pair of kitchen scissors or the handy pizza cutter?
We simply have to know, and so we’re testing the ability of each to cut various foodstuffs and will be awarding a point to the winner in each case, based on the following criteria:
The results will be documented here (a page you can also access via Scissors vs Pizza Wheel in the sidebar), where you will also find some background to the project along with photos and detailed analysis of the results as they arrive.
This is where you come in. We need suggestions of which foods to test next - ideas that stretch our utensils to the limit of their abilities. Remember that this is an important scientific investigation and that your input could be vital. Please post ideas as comments after this post, and check back for regular updates!
