Tales from the ArXiv: The "Chicken McNugget Monoid"

Yes, there really is a mathematical object called the "Chicken McNugget Monoid", and here is a screenshot from page one of the paper.

Apparently, this comes from the standard nugget counts in boxes of Chicken McNuggets. Here is one line from the paper: Under regular integer addition, ⟨6,9,20⟩ forms a monoid, meaning the sum of any two McNugget numbers is again a McNugget number. And if this sounds like something out of The Onion, you may be interested in this recent article.

Also, in case you were wondering: Using [17, Proposition 1 and Table 1], it follows that the Frobenius number of 🐤 is 43. This is the largest number of Chicken McNuggets that cannot be ordered using whole boxes of sizes 6, 9, or 20.

Using a 'Sort' Function to Order the Chicken and the Egg

Wel that settles that. 😂 pic.twitter.com/0xHvS8Dply

— allie, 🎃 the spookiest 👻 transbian 💀 (@aBagorn) October 14, 2018

(I saw this through a 'like' by Chris Danforth on Twitter.)

Unexpected Ass-Kicking (Food Spiciness Department)

Today at lunch I finally got my ass kicked by spicy food. Because I am in Korea, I've been ultra careful about this, and I did well until today.

One of the cool things is that Korea has several US chains that the UK doesn't have, and this gives me the chance to have some favorites (like ice blended drinks at Coffee Bean and ice cream at Baskin Robins) that I don't normally get the chance to have. (I still haven't gotten any smoothies from the one Jamba Juice I saw, and I hope to do that at some point too.)

I noticed a couple of days ago that there is a Popeye's on the Seoil National University campus, which is where my conference is located. I really like Popeye's fried chicken, and we don't have Popeye's in the UK, and today was my chance to go there. And, of all things, it was the spiciness of Popeye's fried chicken that completely kicked my ass. Apparently, they lace the chicken with some stuff here that makes it much spicier than usual, and I was completely unprepared. Ouch!

#caughtoffguard