Smarties

Let’s talk Smarties.

I’m sure they need no introduction unless you were raised on a deserted island. I was looking at a few rolls (those in the photo…Halloween leftovers) and I noticed something interesting. The candies come in six different colors – yellow, white, green, red, orange, and purple – and they are packaged randomly 15 pieces to a roll. This means, that when you look at the sequence of colors in each roll you are looking at a fingerprint of sorts… because each roll is different. 

But how different? How many unique Smarties fingerprints are possible? Well, I’ve calculated that, and there are over 470 billion possible fingerprints. This means the chance of finding two identical rolls is about 1 in 470,000,000,000.

 

Let’s add some perspective…

 

You could give everyone on earth their own unique roll of Smarties… 60 times over.

 

You are more likely to win Powerball… 1,600 times… than you are to find two identical rolls of Smarties.

 

There are two unique rolls for each star in the Milky Way galaxy.

 

There are slightly more than two unique rolls for each atom in the human genome.

 

The actual number of possible unique Smarties rolls is 470,184,984,576.

 

If you had a complete set of unique rolls, and you laid them end-to-end, they would span over 18 million miles. That’s all the way to the moon… and back… 36 times. And if you consumed them all, one piece of candy every second, it would take you more than a quarter million years to eat them all.

 

Do you feel Smartie-er now?

 

I do. And such is life.

Transistors

Check out my iPod from the 1960s… which is why it has a 6T on it… 60s… 6T… get it? Okay… not really. 6T means six transistors… and it’s a radio of course… not an iPod.

Long before electronic grandeur and bragging rights were measured and decided by gigabytes, mega-pixels, and horizontal display resolution, they were governed by the number of transistors a device contained.

Transistors replaced vacuum tubes, so this was the equivalent of a six-vacuum tube radio. And it came with a free case… unlike iPods and iPhones… whose cases range in price from crazy to ridiculous. 

 

When I was fifteen, I built a five-band short-wave radio called a Knight-Star Roamer. It had five vacuum tubes… one of the best presents I ever received. Not sure why I brought that up… just bragging about how many vacuum tubes I once had I suppose. That would be five. I have none now. Such is life.