best burrito in the USA

I'm more at risk of skiing into a tree at 40 MPH. When I ski backwards, it's harder to see where I'm going.

The real danger here is wheeled vehicles. Traffic density is insane, and it's infused with skateboards, motorcycles, bicycles, scooters, razors, pedestrians busy texting, pedestrians ignoring don't-walk signs, panhandlers, shopping carts, trucks, street vendors, various objects, potholes, steel plates, and construction gear, nobody following the laws. I got hit from behind by a bicycle while on the sidewalk not long ago, plus several near-misses; bicycling on the sidewalk is illegal, but practically no non-lethal vehicle infractions are enforced here. It's the Wild West.

If it's $1.50, it's grits. If it's $8, it's polenta.

Both are good with parmesan.

A Dragon Roll (fried shrimp, unagi, avocato) is a thing of beauty.

The stats that go into that must be pretty neat. There's absolutely no reason that the scales should be able to produce net weight, every time. It takes careful study of the process material to determine expected step size, then enough pre-bag scales to guarantee an expected variance of so-and-so.

Can they even guarantee a worst case? I suppose there would always be the off chance that, say, the potato chip frier is pooping out just massive wads of chips, rather than individual flakes, and every scale got one or more wads, and the bags end up either empty or overstuffed. Even then, it can't be worse than zero (nothing got in the bag) or (density of fried potatoes) * (maximum inflated bag volume), so at least there's that.

But between process control (if your fryer is making wads of product, something's wrong) and just good old fashioned statistics, such outliers must be well down in the sigmas. (They could also truncate the distribution of the final bagged product with a post-weigh, or a "we already know this bag sucked, try again".)

Also neat what kinds of things they can do it with. There's probably hundreds of chips in a medium to small bag (not the little snack ones), so the shot noise should be in the 0.1% range (giving numbers like you gave). But it also works with chunkier things, like potatoes and carrots (which end up in convenient, if not always desirable, bags in the supermarket).

There's also bagged celery, but I don't think they strip or pack it, I think it's cut to length. I have to imagine, with a little amusement, either a hedge trimmer, or a huge end mill, or something like that, that comes down on the stalk until it hits the magic weight.

Tim

This is a "partial product weighing machine" :

It can fill a bag of chips to the accuracy of a small fraction of the weight of one average chip. It's amazing to see in action, and the algorithms are interesting.

If you're ever in Fort Lauderdale: Casa Frida

Wow!!