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Statistics Question: How Old is this Bar?
What you’re looking at is a bar made by arranging roughly a hundred bucks* in pennies over the surface and coating them in plastic. I can read the dates off of some of the pennies (those that aren’t flipped upside down), but quite obviously not all the pennies were minted in the same year.
Here’s the question: Judging solely by the dates these pennies were minted what year was this bar constructed? How many dates would I** need to read to have a reasonable confidence in that answer? Should I bother taking dates off of the dull pennies, or only focus on the shiny new ones?
*I arrive at this number by a Fermi estimation. Assuming the bar is twenty feet long, two feet across, and that the radius of a penny is 9.775 mm (thanks Bing) how much is it worth?
**Well, not me personally but I do have a research team nearby. I doubt I’m welcome back in that establishment after telling the bartender that she was going to have trouble finding her tip.
Published in Science & Technology
Perhaps not, depending on your age and agility. It might simply be a prudent cost-benefit calculation.
I am financially well off, so I figure there’s people for whom a coin on the ground will mean more than it does to me, and leave the coins I see for them. I usually pick up the ones I myself have dropped though.
Past a certain age, it’s the definition of prudence.
EDIT: Schmidt’d!
Both Trump and Biden are well off. Trump could probably snatch up a fallen penny with flare and hand it to a nearby kid. Biden would wobble or worse.
By the same measure, throwing aluminum cans out the car window isn’t littering, it’s charity for the people who come and collect the cans and turn them in.
And it promotes healthy physical activity and participation in the economy.
Where I worked a custom developed among the office workers who ate lunch in the nearby park to put the paper trash in the park trash cans but leave the aluminum cans on the conveniently wide rims of the park trash cans.
This is why I throw stones at glass houses. I’m thinking of the economy.
As a rule I pay cash for small purchases, and I’ve been checking pennies ever since this thread went up. My intuition was that I’d find a 2023 penny around March, but it’s been more than twice that.