The Density of Jelly Beans

Last night my wife was telling me about a contest our daycare is running. They have a medium sized bottle sitting out on a desk filled with miniature multi-colored chocolate kisses. The ones that you use for baking. You are supposed to guess the number of kisses in the container. If you are closest you get some sort of prize.

So this morning I go in and take a look at the setup. It wasn't anything fancy, just a clear plastic cylindrical container filled with kisses. I start thinking of ways to approximate the answer. Here is my thinking:

1) Count the number of kisses along the circumference of the cylinder. Call this number C. In this instance it was 56.
2) Compute the cylinder's radius R by the formula C = 2 x pi x R. It comes out to about 8.9.
3) Count how many kisses high the cylinder is. Call this number H. I counted H to be about 10 kisses.
4) Plug this into the volume equation V = H x pi x R x R. So V is approx 2500 kisses.

This is the answer I submitted however the drawing isn't until tomorrow.

On my drive into work I started thinking of better ways to approximate the answer. It seems to me you could take a few random containers of known volume from around the house, fill them with chocolate kisses, and estimate the density of them. Then you could apply this density to any sized container to compute a more accurate answer.

Surely there must already be a site out there that lists density of various objects for these contests? Alas I could not find one. I did find this site on jelly bean density however. I think the jelly beans they use are the old fashioned, larger jelly beans as opposed to the smaller Jelly Belly type beans common today. But it still may be useful... one day... perhaps...

Karma

Karma is real. As proof I offer the following example:

Fun with parking attendants

Every morning I drop my kid off at day care. There is a parking garage at the day care you have to enter in order to drop your kid off. You pull into the garage, press a button, get a ticket, the gate opens. Tickets are validated inside the day care via stamp. When you leave the parking garage you give the ticket to an attendant, they see the validation, they let you leave no charge.

Well one day late last week the day care held an open house. I followed the normal procedure of getting the ticket and validating. After the open house ended, however, the parking garage had closed (its a government run parking garage). So a nice lady from the day care used her electronic key to open the gates and let us all out of the garage.

So the next morning I found myself in an interesting scenario... I had two validated parking tickets. Now, I am a rather curious person who likes to try new things when opportunities present themselves. You can see where I am going with this...

So I give the guy the ticket from the day before. He stares at his validation machine longer than normal and I hear him mutter under his breath "This is the wrong day." So I quickly tell him "Oh, I must have given you the wrong one, I had two. Here is the other one." He snaps up the other one and it goes through just fine. He tells me that I need to make sure I throw away old tickets, yada, yada.

Okay, so no secret plots to cheat the garage... LOL.

Well this morning I went to grab the ticket from the machine and it fell to the pavement. I opened my door, grabbed it, and proceeded as normal. When I gave my ticket to the guy (it happened to be the same guy), he took longer than normal to open the gate...

He turns to me and tells me this is the ticket from yesterday, and it wanted to charge me $7.00! I must have grabbed a bad ticket!

I tried to explain to him best I could about what had happened... the ticket falling, me grabbing it, so one and so forth. He wasn't buying any of it. He reiterated his story that I should throw away old parking tickets, and how some guy the day before gave him a ticket for $300.00.

I managed to talk him out of the $7.00. But beware...