An Aliquot of Pennies

An Aliquot of Pennies

If I had not turned around for a quick second as we were walking back into the house I would not have noticed that the trunk of Ian’s car was open.  It might have stayed open like that for the whole day and nothing would have been taken because the neighborhood is very quiet and safe.  But I called back to Lee that I was going back to close it anyway.  Lee said his dad often accidentally opened the trunk with the remote and didn’t notice.  It is the kind of thing that Ian does, like wearing two different colored socks (which I am not saying he does, just that wearing two different socks exemplifies a certain ‘non-observatory quality’ of life that Ian is know for throughout the family).  At the top of the driveway the poor Volvo sat with two brand new flat tires and an open trunk full of money.  I won’t go into the blown tires story right now but the money was very interesting.  I will explain.

The trunk was full and in disarray-as I would have expected.  Plastic bags with empty egg cartons was the first mystery.  Lee had followed me up.  This is disturbing in so many ways, I said, peering into the maw of the trunk.  Why would anyone drive around with empty egg cartons?  And then I noticed another bag with a couple of pounds of small change which I picked up and felt the weight of in my hand.  Under that bag was a pint Chinese food take-out container similarly filled with nickels, dimes, pennies and quarters as well as a tangled length of dental floss.   I removed that container and Lee gently nudged me to the side and he began investigating the trunk himself.  He uncovered multiple containers and bags containing stashes of coins and pretty soon there was a formidable collection of money extracted from Ian’s trunk and piled up at the top of the driveway.  Lee found a canvas sack into which he dumped all of the money and, with some difficulty, because it weighed quite a lot, he carried the sack into the house. 

Back inside the house there was a lot of discussion-between Ian and Rebecca and Lee-as to how long the money had taken to accumulate in the trunk of the Volvo, who was going to bring it in to the coin machine at Krogers and convert it to ‘real money’, how much it must cost in extra gasoline to run a car around with all that extra weight, and (for reasons I understand only very, very loosely) how many men firing rifles at the same time it would take to physically stop a speeding train.  We did determine that the empty egg cartons were being transported for ‘recycling’ though I am still unclear how long Ian had been carrying them in his car and when he actually planned to unload them.  There was no further mention of the dental floss.  All this discussion spawned a debate about the total value of the accumulation and a scientific collaboration to determine same. 

So, to briefly summarize- we now had an M.D./general surgeon (Ian), a former chemistry major and know-it-all (Me), a researcher from the C.D.C./PhD (Lee), a dentist and major player in the National Dental/Sleep movement (Sheri-though she was mostly napping on the couch with a warm blanket), and a salesperson/cum dental hygienist (Rebecca) working rigorously on theories/calculations/spreadsheets/scales and internet investigations in order to determine the value of approximately forty to fifty pounds of loose change.  It was an inspired team of highly trained professionals on the trail of truth.  We worked for an hour (and change!) and I will set forth below our basic hypothesis and very briefly describe our scientific technique.

First we fiddled excessively with our iphones and hand held calculators and postulated on various formulae we might use to come to a successful valuation.  Then Lee got down to business and opened an Excel spread sheet which he informed us he does for all his projects including selection from the lunch menu at the C.D.C. cafeteria.  Rebecca set forth combing the bag, picking out all of the foreign coins and tokens from the Atlanta public transportation system.  Ian had lunch and Sheri closed her eyes and snuggled under the blanket after finally giving up on the entire scheme and leaving it, in what she called, qualified hands.  I was instructed by Lee to ‘draw and aliquot’ of coins and weigh them accurately on the kitchen scale.  We then determined how many pennies, five cent pieces (also known as nickels), dimes, and quarters were to be found in our scientifically drawn sample.  All of this data was plugged into Lees spread sheet and we determined that there was approximately $320-$328 in the bag.  Of course this was all predicated on a theoretical weight of the bag of money itself, which we guessed was fifty pounds.  Unfortunately there was no instrument for verifying this estimate anywhere to be found in the house as Jeffery (since gone to California and not available for comment in this particular experiment) had thrown out the bathroom scale one day when it was particularly insulting to him.  Next years budget for equipment will include a replacement.  But for now we could only guess…I mean hypothesize!

I will leave the nuts and bolts description of the experiment design and implementation as well as the final determination and results to my colleague, Lee, who had promised to “write it up” in his usual uber-professional method.  It has been a privilege to have been a participant.