The Waffle House Index
This is the 21st installment of 774: Weekly lessons from history about science, technology, and the miscellaneous.
This Week:
The Waffle House Index
The world is a complicated place. There are innumerable variables effecting innumerable outcomes that are all very difficult to measure. We do our best to make up models to help make sense of the confusion. Some of the heuristics we come up with are more sophisticated than others.
In 2011, Joplin, Missouri, was decimated by a tornado.It was the deadliest Tornado on record in the U.S. causing 161 deaths. Joplin was leveled in many areas and it would take years to fully recover. In the wake of the disaster, Craig Fugate, the director of FEMA, commented that
“If you get there and the Waffle House is closed? That’s really bad. That’s where you go to work.”
The comment was in jest, but Fugate quickly realized their might be some value to the idea and the Waffle House Index (WHI) was born.1 The Waffle House Index is a three color code describing the operability of what are essentially I-85 mile markers. Green indicates that all is well. Customers are coming and going as they always do. Yellow means that the restaurant is operating, but serving a limited menu. This restricted menu is what the restaurant does in the face of moderate events that may restrict its ability to resupply foodstuffs. Red is the worst case scenario that almost never happens: the restaurants temporarily closes. Waffle House is open 24/7 and has an almost unheard of disaster preparedness. This is what makes the index so useful to a group like FEMA. If Waffle House can’t even open, things must be quite bad.
The Waffle House Index isn’t the only food based model to help understand our complicated planet. There are quite a few food based models to provide insights into economics, foreign policy, and physics.
The Big Mac Index (BMI…)
The Big Mac Index helps to measure the Purchasing Power Parity of one currency to another. Purchasing Power Parity is a proportion given by how much of one currency it takes to buy a good verses buying that same good in a different currency. In a perfect world, the price of a Big Mac in every country should be the same price after accounting for exchange rates, but this is not the case. For example, $30 will buy 3x as many Big Macs in Mumbai as it will in Toronto. The Economist has published a yearly Big Mac Index that provides these proportions across a wide variety of currencies.2 Why the Big Mac? Because this ubiquitous sandwich is available in many countries and thus it is very easy to find the actual price of a Big Mac in, say, Taiwan and Argentina.
But there is a slight problem with BMI. Big Macs can’t be found in every country. Africa in particular has massive regions without a old arch in sight. Luckily a certain military leader has addressed the issue.
The KFC Index
Colonel Sanders first landed in Africa in 1971. South Africa gained the first location with Egypt and Mauritius following soon after. KFC is far more present in Africa than McDonalds so it is a far more useful in determining differences in Purchasing Power Parity there. The KFC index works just like the Big Mac Index, but only applies to countries in Africa.
Via
Wikipedia Commons
So McDonalds and KFC are helpful in describing economies, but what about solving world peace?
The Golden Arches Theory
In addition to being complicated, Earth is historically speaking a very violent place to live. Lots of bright minds have tried to make it less so with varying degrees of success. Thomas Friedman, in his book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization,3 suggests that the answer might lie in ground beef and french fries. Thomas observes that no two countries which are home to a McDonald’s franchise have ever gone to war with each other. The theory rests on the idea that McDonald’s franchises correlate to a large middle class in a nation and, the theory goes, nations with large middle classes are disinterested in sending their children to fight and pay heavy taxes to support a military conflict. To Friedman, putting McNuggets on the menu takes war off of it.
The Banana Equivalent Dose
Bananas are radioactive. There is a normal amount of radiation that you or I are exposed to on a daily basis. Some days that number is in flux if you go to the hospital or a nuclear power plant, but in every day life the amount of radiation exerted on your body relatively is steady.
The average banana has roughly half a gram of Potassium and Potassium is one of the largest natural sources of radiation. One gram of Potassium is home to 31 becquerel (Bq). Becquerel is a measurement of the quantity of radioactive material in which one nucleus decays every second. Since Bananas contain half a gram of of potassium, the average banana is 15 Bq. In the average banana there are 15 nuclei decaying every second.4 On an individual level this is pretty insignificant, but when taken in mass, it can get tricky. At the border, trucks are scanned for contraband entering the country. On that list of contraband is radioactive material. When scans of radioactivity of trucks are conducted, trucks of bananas frequently register false alarms as radioactive material.5
The Banana Equivalent Dose utilizes the known and unusually high amount of radiation to help clarify, rather humorously just how much radiation an individual has been exposed to as a number of equivalent bananas that would equal the same amount.