The Pizza constant

Every good mathematical or physics formula has a constant.

I discovered a new constant yesterday , quite by accident, whilst writing an email to my good friend Joni.

I was explaining to her about when my cooker suddenly broke down. Not in an emotional way, it just stopped working. I'm not sure cookers have emotions. I think some electrical appliances do have emotions, for example my fridge, which has been revelling in my torture for some time now.

My fridge is just a youngster of about 2 years old. It was manufactured by Beko, a company I always presumed was Japanese, but it turns out they are Turkish in origin. Already, you can see the problem, letting Turkish people make electrical goods. A nation famous for kebabs and other fatty delicacies. However Turkish labourers re-built Berlin after WW2 and made a bloody good job of it, so why not have a manufacturing industry? Unfortunately for the Turkish kebab swilling labourers, fridges and other electrical equipment aren't usually constructed from bricks and mortar, under the direct supervision of a squad of Nazi commanders who've just lost a war and have been 're-skilled'. I am sure the Turkish took a few short cuts with fridge building, using materials like egg-plant and yoghurt, where clearly alloyed metals should have been employed. I guess that's why, just after the 1st anniversary of it's purchase, it failed horribly, defrosting everything inside. It's only got worse from there. I paid £300 for one year of reliable refrigeration. This is very un-Turkish indeed. I have been eating kebabs for years and by the look of my bloated frame, they are ALL still with me. I digress (which is the point of blogging).

So back to the story of my cooker. Ironically due to the nature of this post, which will become clear no doubt, I discovered that my cooker was knackered when I found a stone cold pizza in there after 20 mins of cooking, with cold air. So I rushed out to buy another one. I got a second hand one though because we want to move this year and I didn't want to shell out for a new one that we may end up leaving behind. The new one is very nice, nice and gassy, which the other one wasn't.

Electric cookers are shit to cook on but the nature of the fan assistance in the oven makes for perfect pizzas. They are crispy and cooked all the way through. Gas however is a different story. The hob cooking experience is a sheer delight, instantaneous temperature control, a luxury. The oven however is total toilet. Put it on, wait for a fortnight, then it's just about ready to cook, badly.

So here comes the real science behind this blog. Whilst writing the email to Joni, I realised that I use the hob more than I use the oven for the specific task of cooking pizza. So although I am happy about the thrill of instantaneous temperature control, I am disappointed about having burnt round the edge-soft in the middle pizza.

Let's put that into a formula where:

H= Happiness (measured in Jollynesses)
nP= Number of pizzas cooked for any given time period (expressed in pizzas per unit time) The SI (Scottish Idiot) unit for this is Pizza/week.
F= Fuel type where Electric ovens have a higher 'oven quotient' than Gas.

The formula is therefore:

H=F/nP

Elementary you may say, but my discovery is the 'oven quotient' for Gas. It's -5, whereas an electric oven is 7.5. So with 1 pizza per week cooked on Gas Jollyness is -5. Conversely, for every 1 pizza per week cooked in an electric fan based oven the Jollyness is 7.5.

So as we can clearly see, whilst cooking with a Gas oven, Happiness is inversely proportional to number of pizzas cooked. Whereas with an Electric oven, the opposite is true.


I am hoping to get this ground breaking and philosophical epiphany published in New Scientist magazine. This could revolutionise the world, by promoting happiness and unhealthiness across the globe.

Stephen Hawking popularised 'String theory', the understanding that a body with a gravitational pull acts like a ball in a blanket, please, spare me, was that one of the blankets he was dribbling on? What the fuck has he ever done for science except disprove one of Newton's fundamental laws. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction according to Newton's third law. So what happened when his wife knocked fuck out of him in 2004? He fell out of his wheelchair and she escaped without sanction. Well done Stephen, you've just blown away one of the foundations of Physics.

And Einstein, what the fuck did that forgetful fluffy haired weirdo ever add to society. I'll tell you, 2 flattened Japanese cities and 40 years of cold-war terror. Well done old man. Pretty clever eh, but never remembered to wash.

So in short, I hope to be held up there amongst the greats with this discovery. It has also led me to the conclusion that to attain true happiness I must eat less pizzas from now on, unless I change my cooker of course.