Addendum and Dunkin Donuts and Life

 I need to add a few things to yesterday's post that are obviously missing. It's been bothering me all day please just bear with me.

First, I never even calculated the expected value of the random binomial method. That can be defined as: 

    np = 100 * (0.3) = 30 * 60k Bell Profit = 1,800,000 Bells

 Just from that, its clear this method isn't expected to profit as much as our linear method.  

 Second, one simulation?? I have let you, the reader, down. Let's see 1,000 simulations. 

 

  

 Mmmm a nice sweet normal(ish) curve. The mean of our simulations was a little greater than the expected value, coming in at 1,811,8200 Bells. Still worse than burying 10k Bells, the conclusion stands!

 

Ok thank you for bearing with me, it was really bothering me that I left those out. 

 

I got dunkin donuts again this morning. I really think it's the best commuter coffee you can get. It's just the perfect level of tolerable to wake me up on the train and not good enough to make me feel like I'm wasting a good cup of coffee on a boring work commute.  

  

I've been listening to To Love Somebody by Holly Humberstone on repeat. I can't wait for her new album, I'm sure I'll be normal about it. 

Optimizing New Horizons Money Trees

The money trees in Animal Crossing New Horizons are a great way to continuously gain bells with pretty much no effort. Just bury 10K Bells in the glowing spot each day and reap 30k Bells from the spot when the tree fully grows in 3 days. 

But according to the Animal Crossing Wiki, there's actually a 30% chance that, upon burying more than 10K Bells, your money will be tripled when the tree eventually grows. 

Nookpedia.com chart of money tree return rates in acnh

 So would the optimal method for planting money trees actually be to plant 30k each day? You wouldn't make a profit every time a tree grows, but when you do make a profit it would be 40k Bells greater. I wanted to quickly explore this thought. 

The Methods

Let's quickly define our 2 methods of Bell yield mathematically. 

 

Guaranteed (Linear) Yield Method

 This is a linear function where, each day a tree grows, the player is able to gain 20k Bells. 

   y = 20x 

(we can multiply the result by 1000, I do not want to keep typing out that many zeros.)

 

Random (30k) method

This is a cumulative binomial function!  The player plants 30k Bells each day and has a 30% chance to profit 60K Bells or a 70% chance to make nothing (never losing any Bells). 

 

To clarify, 30k bells is the minimum number of bells that can be returned if a player plants 10k or more bells (see chart above). If a player buried more than 30k bells each day they would incur losses each day they did not succeed in getting the 3x return on buried bells.

 

For this experiment let's initially look at a window of 100 days. We can define our function then as

    X ~ Bin(100, 0.3)
 

Outcomes!  

I threw a simple simulation together in R and plotted the cumulative profits of both methods over the 100 days in our experiment. 

 

...and yeah it doesn't look great for the random method. 

bell yield over 100 simulated days

After simulating 100 days of both discussed methods, the first linear method ends squarely at 2,000,000 bells. The Random Method reaches 100 days with 1,560,000 bells. 440,000 Bells short! 

 

With this simulation it's pretty easy to recommend burying 10k Bells each day and not worrying about anything else. 

 

Finally I will leave you with a simulation of 15k, 20k, and 25k bells compared to the linear method just to see how much worse they are than even the 30k method.

 

all much worse! yikes!

 

I Like Recipe Stories

 I like it when I find a recipe online and there's a story at the beginning of it. There I said it. Cooking is a social task! Learning about the recipes that bring people comfort in bad times or remind someone of an exciting moment in their life feels really special, even intimate. For that reason I find it really beautiful when I find a recipe online with a cute story at the start. 

It's one of the reasons I love getting the Cook's Illustrated magazine. There's always a spread with a nice recipe and the author's experiences with the recipe! Here's a page from the most recent issue with a crab rangoon recipe. 

Along with a straightforward recipe, there's a whole article on the history of the dish and the author's personal connection with it. I love it! Cooking is a social activity and it feels so cold and wrong to simply pull a recipe online. It's lovely to hear why the author liked it, or their experiences in cooking it.

That isn't to say its always good. Many times the sections preceding a recipe are SEO slop, with headers like "easy [recipe name]" immediately followed by a header like "[recipe name] for dinner" with essentially the same information under it. I'm not a fan of those, it makes the recipe feel robotic and alien. It's the same with AI generated recipes, but respectfully if you are asking a chatbot for a recipe it may be too late for you.

Completely aside I was looking at my camera roll for photos of food and I realized I have a truly insane number of photos of dunkin cups.

  

dunking donuts 

It's snowing a little today, I watched the Smosh reddit stories and traveled far away to get my cat a very specific flavor of food because she will not eat anything else. I love her. Thank you for reading, I think this is a week of blog posts. Wherever you are reading from I hope you are having a lovely day! 

At the bus stop last night

Last night I left my friend's house and walked to the bus stop. The snow banks piled up on the sides of the roads glistened in the soft glow of the street lights, still melting in the slightly-above-freezing air. No moon hung in the sky and no stars were visible either, just a black canvas for the various storefronts I walked pass to spill light on to. 

The bus stop is a sign in the sidewalk, no shelter or bench. If you were walking fast you could go by it without noticing. A clearing in the snowbanks marks a haphazard path to board the bus, whenever it might arrive. Now standing next to the sign, I kicked some of the snow bank aside and stuffed my hands in my pockets. I had 6 minutes to kill. 

A minute or two after I arrived at the bus stop another person, equally as bundled up as I was, arrived to wait. We stood wordlessly as cars and people passed on either side of us. 

Another minute passed and a bulldozer appeared to clear more of the snow bank on the other side of the road. Gigantic, weathered, and yellow. It was easily twice the height and length as any other vehicle on the road at the time and did not seem interested in following any of the rules or lines as the other vehicles. Cars apprehensively waited in either direction as the bulldozer methodically cleared, reversed, and again cleared the side of the road. Occasionally a car would sneak by to wait at the intersection directly ahead. A mound of snow started to accumulate in the street. More cars slipped by. The bulldozer continued clearing. The mound of snow was now taller than I was. My phone said my bus was delayed.

Suddenly the next car to slip by wasn't a car, but a dump truck. Emblazoned with a city contractor logo and a number of savage dents lining the sides, it too wasn't interested in the rules or lines of other cars  and parked itself in the middle of the road, roughly 4 feet from where I was standing behind the snow bank.

 The bulldozer promptly began depositing the mound of snow it had built up into the back of the dump truck. Occasionally a loud bang would echo off the nearby storefronts as the bulldozer miscalculated it's height and smacked into the side of the dump truck. A car sneaks by the unfolding scene. Then another. 

 The dump truck reaches capacity and lurches away newly loaded with filthy snow. The bulldozer stops at the side of the road for a moment, it's floodlights casting the world around me in bright lights and harsh shadow. It's a brief moment. The bulldozer pulls away and the night falls back into darkness. Cars flow freely again. The bus comes. I forgot my Charlie Card. I walk back to my friends house.  

Seinfeld episodes that fascinate me

I like Seinfeld. The show, not the person. I feel that's an important distinction to make. My parents lived in New York in the 90's and would watch the show as it aired. Growing up they would play reruns constantly, and my sense of humor was irrevocably damaged as a result. 

My feelings towards the show have transcended "love" and "hate". Nearly every episode both has a moment that makes (or has made) me cry laughing and a moment to remind me that it was made in the 90s. These are not my favorite episodes, they are just the ones I think about a lot.

S5 E7 The Non-Fat Yogurt (1993)

  

I remember watching this when I was little and being very confused about the comments about Jerry and Elaine gaining weight. I thought they both looked completely normal. Elaine gains five pounds and it's played as if she became some undateable monster.

 

This episode also has an appearance from Rudy Giuliani! Back when he was normal(?) and not the C-tier cartoon supervillain he has morphed into in recent years.

 

 

 

 Kramer also dates a lab tech and wonders if frozen yogurt changes it's chemical makeup when it melts. His mind is so empty I love him.

 

S5 E14 The Marine Biologist (1993)

It's very endearing to me that George constantly refers to whales as fish. Through the entire episode. He poses as a Marine Biologist to woo a woman and spews nonsense sentences with works like "plankton", "kelp", "algae". It's so stupid I find it charming. I do, unfortunately, think this would work on me. Jerry loses his favorite shirt to the wash and is given another stark reminder that all we love in this world will weather to dust. Kramer hits golf balls into the ocean. 

 

S6 E12 The Label Maker (1995) 

A lot to think about here. Kramer and Newman playing risk reminds me of a running camp I went to in High School where all the boys played a game of risk over the entire week long camp. It was extremely high stakes, there were a lot of arguments, and more than one friendship did not survive the crucible of global conflict simulated by the board game. I don't know who won or if there was a conclusion to the  game beyond the camp ending and everyone going back home. I've seen physical fights that were less intense than that game of risk.

 

Kramer's game of risk ends on the subway when an older Ukrainian man smashes the game after hearing Kramer refer to Ukraine as "weak". It's weird to hear people  refer to Ukraine as "The Ukraine", but the USSR had just fallen so I guess it was new to everyone.

 Also in this episode is a plot about re-gifting that I love. Jerry gets a label maker from Tim Whatley (Bryan Cranston!!!) and learns that the label maker was initially a gift from Elaine. Personally I think re-gifting is fine under specific circumstances. If someone I know handcrafts something for me I will never give it away and cherish it forever, but I think mass market products are fair game to re-gift (but not back to that same person!!!). 

 

Jerry also tries to "un-gift" a set of super bowl tickets, which I always thought was insane. Gifts are not something to give and take at a whim, I believe Jerry is being unreasonable. 

 

S9 E2 The Voice (1997)

Part 2 of a subplot where George pretends to be handicapped because the company that hired him is nice to him (it's actually more insane than that but lets not worry about it now). I actually only think about it because of George's private "handicapped" bathroom at the company.  

 

awful netflix screen grab im sorry

 

It's just so beautiful, the golf clubs, the flowers, radio, magazines. What are you doing with all this George? It's a bathroom. 

 

The rest of this episode is a plot about another woman being humiliated by Jerry for no reason other than his own petty childishness and Kramer committing fraud. 

That's it for now, I would 100% recommend you watch Seinfeld if you haven't. The humor in it holds up (*for cis-straight-white people disclaimer) and it has that 90's listlessness that I find somewhat cozy in 2026. There is really nothing happening in these characters minds. They are simple people doing silly things and getting into trouble for it.