The Ongoing Work Stoppage

Today I will demonstrate exactly how irrelevant blogs are.

As I was brushing my teeth last night, my eye fell upon a box of bandaids – excuse me, Band-Aid® Brand Adhesive Bandages – and I noticed the following diagram:

So there are ten 1″ wide bandaids, twenty 3/4″ bandaids and thirty 5/8″ bandaids per box. Man, I thought, that’s some kind of reciprical relation between bandaid width (W) and number of bandaids per box (N). So being sleep-deprived and a hopeless math geek, I played around with it a bit and discovered that this nifty little relation held:

(N + 10)(W – ¹/₄) = 15

Try it, it works. Man, I thought again, that’s a neat expression. I mean, I played around with some other forms, like N = aW²+bW+c or NW = aW²+bW+c , and got ugly numbers like 310/3 for the coefficients. But that equation up there, that’s pretty elegant. It’s a sort of superstition amoung mathematicians and physicists, that an equation that looks pretty is more likely to be right than one that doesn’t. Almost as if Johnson & Johnson actually determined how many bandaids of each size went in the box using that formula. It’s like one of those story problems from highschool, where you always used to think in the back of your mind, “What kind of messed up company uses rules like that, really?”.

So now I’m on the look-out for a box that contains fifty 1/2″ wide bandaids. Of course, taking it to its logical consequences, that means that I should also be on the look-out for a box of one thousand 107/404″ wide bandaids. And that somewhere, deep in some enchanted stronghold of the Johnson & Johnson compound, there’s a box that contains an infinite number of 1/4″ bandaids. The Johnsons probably got it from the Devil in exchange for their souls, and the company uses the raw materials to make larger bandaids.

Oh yeah, I’ve got it all figured out now. That’s the power of math!