c4countdown

Well here it is - the thread you've all been waiting for. I don't think I need to explain the options.

There are severe penalties for selling underweight bread. Your scales are not consistent. So for an order of 12 loaves you throw in an extra 8.33% which gives you what you deem to be a decent confidence level of being within the law. For an order of 144 loaves, for that level of confidence you do not have to throw in as much as 12 extra loaves, but I've long since forgotten how to work out the answer.

More than there are in a nun's nasty.

David Williams wrote: ↑Fri Jul 12, 2019 9:32 pm There are severe penalties for selling underweight bread. Your scales are not consistent. So for an order of 12 loaves you throw in an extra 8.33% which gives you what you deem to be a decent confidence level of being within the law. For an order of 144 loaves, for that level of confidence you do not have to throw in as much as 12 extra loaves, but I've long since forgotten how to work out the answer.

This is interesting, I must admit I didn't know the origin of the phrase. But it must have been coined in the days of estimating ingredients, surely? Were early weighing scales really that inaccurate? When the phrase originated, all scales would have been simple mechanical balances, using metal weights on one side and the weighed ingredients on the other. The weights don't suddenly change and surely the balances can't have been that inaccurate, can they? Certainly not 8.33% inaccurate, otherwise why even bother with them?

8.33% is just the first available increment, so the truly acceptable level could be anywhere between 0.01% and 8.33%. Of the 3 main options, 169 is therefore clearly way too high, and 145 almost certainly too low. I'm going to suggest 152.

1872

From the Wikipedia:

To protect themselves bakers would add (throw in) a small piece of bread to each order, called the 'in-bread' to ensure they could not be accused of short measure. For large orders of 12 loaves this would be a whole extra loaf.

This implies that it's not a whole extra loaf or nothing. They could have put in a small bit of extra bread, but for a dozen, they explicitly chose a whole extra loaf. So maybe 8.33% is the magic number after all, and the answer is 156.

Someone not on this forum suggested 149 because it's the next prime number after 144 (like 13 is the next prime after 12), and it's done to make things as awkward as possible for people wanting to divide things out evenly.