For the past year or so, I’ve been tim­ing how long it takes for me to go through the check­outs at our gro­cery store to see which is faster.

The meth­od­o­logy is quite simple. Once I’ve got all my gro­cer­ies, I go to the same spot near the check­outs. To avoid bias­ing myself, I check my cell phone to determ­ine whether to go through the self check­outs or the nor­mal check­outs. Because my cell phone lacks a ran­dom num­ber gen­er­ator, I check the last digit of the time: an even digit means I go through the nor­mal check­out and an odd digit means I go through self check­out. I then start the stop­watch and time how long it takes for me to go through the check­out and leave the store.

I’ve got 31 data points and have finally decided that if one type of check­out is faster than the other, the dif­fer­ence is small enough to not really mat­ter. Here’s the scat­ter­plot:

A sample size of 31 is unim­press­ive, to be sure, but it’s large enough that I can finally rest easy know­ing it would be a waste of time to col­lect more data. Try­ing to get out of the gro­cery store in the fast­est way pos­sible seems to have more import­ant factors, such as the num­ber of jerks ahead of you in line.

As a side note on how that scat­ter­plot is presen­ted, it prob­ably would have made a lot more sense to meas­ure the time taken as a func­tion of how many items I bought, rather than the cash value of the items I bought. I’m far too lazy to count things, though.

So, from now on I’ll be decid­ing on self check­out versus nor­mal check­out based on how social I’m feel­ing. I sus­pect that means I’ll be using the self check­out a lot.

For the past year or so, I've been timing how long it takes for me to go through the checkouts at our grocery store to see which is faster. The methodology is quite simple. Once I've got all my groceries, I go to the same spot near the checkouts. To avoid biasing myself, I check ...

I had this crazy idea to start up a new web­site today, spe­cific­ally a wiki.

Jasna’s veget­arian and I’m semi-​​vegetarian (“flex­it­arian”, Wiki­pe­dia informs me), only because I’m a picky eater and the veget­arian options out­side of what we pre­pare at home often aren’t great.

Envir­on­mental reas­ons are cer­tainly the primary reas­ons for both of us. Meat is inher­ently inef­fi­cient: for most anim­als humans eat, it takes some­where around 10 Cal­or­ies of plant mat­ter to make 1 Cal­orie of animal mat­ter and it would make a lot of sense envir­on­ment­ally — and prob­ably eco­nom­ic­ally as well — to cut out the middle man and just eat the 10 Cal­or­ies of plant mat­ter. That inef­fi­ciency leads to increase land usage, water usage, soil erosion, etc. There are other envir­on­mental prob­lems, such as sewage and meth­ane emissions.

Well today I was lament­ing to myself that there really is no resource for find­ing out exactly what the envir­on­mental costs of foods are! To be sure, draw­ing the line at meat is a little arbit­rary. Veget­arian food, espe­cially meat altern­at­ives like TVP, can go through a lot of pro­cessing and, for all I know in my ignor­ance, end up being just as bad as meat. On the other side, for all I know, also in my ignor­ance, there are some meats out there that really aren’t a big prob­lem at all.

So I have a vis­ion: what if there were a wiki that allowed con­sol­id­at­ing inform­a­tion and maybe even ori­ginal research into what the envir­on­mental costs of foods are?

I don’t know if it’s prac­tical at all. To gauge interest I did my best at ask­ing an unbiased sur­vey while keep­ing an eye on the “Envir­on­mental dam­age from hus­bandry” option. My biggest fear is I’d just be cre­at­ing a web­site for myself that no one else will ever read; I already have one of those.

The closest thing I’ve found to what I’m look­ing for is food­ori­gins but it’s not really aim­ing at the same thing.

I don’t know. I’ll mull it over for a while longer. At stake is $10 for a domain regis­tra­tion and how­ever long it takes to set up a wiki these days.

I had this crazy idea to start up a new website today, specifically a wiki. Jasna's vegetarian and I'm semi-vegetarian ("flexitarian", Wikipedia informs me), only because I'm a picky eater and the vegetarian options outside of what we prepare at home often aren't great. Environmental reasons are certainly the primary reasons for both of us. Meat ...