As has become habit while mulling over (mathematical) morsels upstairs, I turn my mind to other matters. This weekend — and I'm a little surprised I hadn't considered this sort of thing before — I thought it would be interesting to measure a couple of things:

The first two relate to coffee: how much time will I have passed in a coffee shop when I have gone as far as my education will take me (for the sake of optimism, let's suppose I end up completing a PhD), and, more generally, how many gallons of coffee (and tea — I love chai) will I have consumed by this point?

When I first posed this question to myself, I tried to make a few rough extrapolative estimates, using my current affinity for coffee and my average number of trips to Espresso Royale as guides, but I quickly lost my mental sense of scale, and I haven't yet put forth the energy into punching a few buttons on my calculator.

I can tell you, though, that the numbers will be quite large, indeed. Embarrassingly so, you might say.

The third and final quantity in which I am interested is the number of reams of plain white paper I'll have used for scratch. Unless I know precisely what I am doing — and believe me, at this point, such an occurrence is rare — I tend to use at least one side of a sheet per problem. I tend to toss one or two sheets per assignment before I am through, and I rarely use pencil, because it often turns out that a once-crossed out result is actually pretty close to the mark, whereas an erased result is lost forever.

Of course, there are other considerations here, too. If I make it to graduate school, there's a decent chance I'll have a blackboard or a whiteboard to my name, at least in-part, in which case much of my scratch will end up on the wall, with a large "DNE" not too far away.