The "Mathematical Formulae" Story

It was an ordinary day. Just found a special equation that can be used for dunking my cookies in milk. Yep! A few months ago I wrote about all the things I love to dunk, primarily in milk. Everything from cake to donuts to cookies. Well sometimes when I dunk cookies I keep them submerged too long and they start to break apart and fall to the bottom of the glass or I catch them at just about the right time and while taking them from the milk to my mouth they fall apart. Seems that in 1998 the University of Bristol in England asked a visiting fellow in physics to try to crack the problem. He found that there already was a mathematical formula called the Washburn equation that could be used to help me with my cookie-dunkin’. Had something to do with the flow of my milk in porous materials such as cookies. Took into consideration the pore diameter of the holes in the cookies. Too much for me. All I want to do is dunk! Then as I read on he tried to put it in plain English. Said that my problem with dunking is if I want to get the milk into the cookie, I have to let the holes and channels of the cookie suck it in, which means I got to give it time for that to happen. Duh! And, if I let it in too long, the cookie will fall apart. And this guy is a fellow in physics. Me thinks he got the wrong type of physics in mind. But, I read on anyway. He told me that I should dunk the cookie 3.5 to 5 seconds. That’s enough time for it to suck in the milk, but not enough time for it to dissolve. Also, how I dunk it makes a difference. If I dunk the cookie with it parallel to the surface of the milk, so that only one side gets wet, it will take four times as long-14 to 20 seconds-as if I dunk it vertically. And these guys get paid to write this stuff. Any kid knows that if you lay it flat on the milk it will take a lot longer than if you hold it with both sides in the milk at the same time. He does admit that dipping the “Scientific” way has a higher degree of difficulty (and probably looks insane). In this way you eat cookies and milk with a plastic tube stuck up your nose so you can analyze the gases wafting up from our palate. The more milk the cookie held, the better it’s flavor release. You getting all of this? I find that when I buy the store brand cookies, they fall apart sooner than the name-brand cookies. Wonder if he thought about that. I can see there may be a need for a “cookie timer” somewhere in my future. Maybe that can be my next patent. It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.