Monday: MLK day

Which means I get the day off because my state isn't horrible, and that means I went out to get sushi today.

You might not be able to tell, but this was a beautiful piece of salmon.

Oddly enough, for absolutely no good reason, I realized that going for sushi involves two Poisson process problems that should be solvable, but it's 9:30, and I want to get this post up and done by 10, so it might have to wait until tomorrow.

The first problem (which I think is probably easier) is the Counter Problem: Given a 20-seat counter (because that's how long it is), is it always best to seat in party order, or can you minimize the amount of waiting using some other method.  Assume all parties have between 1 and 4 members, and that each party takes k minutes to finish.  Minimize the person-minutes of waiting customers, who arrive in parties every m minutes (where 20 / (avg(party size)) = m / k for a steady state solution).  This should be easier because it's basically a generative process:  make the distributions, let it run, and see what you get.  Blammo.

The second, more interesting, problem is what I'm calling the Karaage Problem:  Given an observed set of d dishes of karaage on the belt, estimate how long they've been out.  The motivation here is that fresh karaage is better than old, so you don't want the one that's been sitting out for 45 minutes.  The assumptions here are pretty simple:  karaage always comes out in k dishes because they fry them all at once, and they're then removed from the belt by a Poissonian process.  There's a meta-solution as well, which tells you how old things should be if all karaage is drawn by people who know the solution to the original problem.  This is the one I really want to know, because I think k is equal to 5 or 6, and there were d = 3 today.  I didn't take one, because my guess solution meant this was like 20-30 minutes, and that didn't sound great.

• Animals.
• Grumpy panda.
• Don't fuck with bunnies.
• Political stuff.
• Fucking what?
• Remember the time the Klan wrote a letter asking Seattle's city council to start investigating the Nazis?
• I guess Henry Gee is a dickbag?  I guess it's good to have that identified.
• I don't really like the show, but having...fuck.  Her name isn't Blossom, that was the show.  Mayim Bialik.  Anyway, this interview guy is also a dickbag.
• Other stuff.
• Ash Ketchum.  Ashley Ketchum.  No, I'm serious.  That was his alias in at least one of those.
• Who the fuck steals a microwave?
• Archer.  I think this is now my third favorite show on now, as Rick and Morty just hit another one out of the park this evening, moving up to #2.
• Oh wait, let's not do this one as a link.

After sushi, I went to get groceries, luckily finding that after two weeks, pastrami is available again.  Why was there a run on pastrami?  Who knows.

In any case, I got the idea that I wanted to get stuff to make tikka masala, and have that this week.  I picked up a packet of this sauce stuff, and some naan.  I forgot to take a picture of the final product, which is why I completely forgot about this until I found the link in the linkpile.  My conclusions are:

• This is not as good as actual restaurant TM, and if I actually wanted to spend effort, I could have cooked a better one from scratch.  Probably.
• This really only takes like no effort to make, so the tradeoff is marginally worth it.
• It calls for two pounds of meat (or veggies), and that's probably about right.  However, it looks like it doesn't make too much, probably because there isn't a bunch of extra sauce.
• WF brand garlic naan has a really weird metallic taste that I don't really like.