Is toilet paper measured using some sort of new math???

A week or so ago - which, if measured in COVID-19 years, is about 97 years back - MSNBC's Brian Williams and NY Times editor Mara Gay caught some flack for seriously taking a tweet in which the tweeter claimed that Mike Bloomberg could have taken the $500M he spent on ads during his non-starter run for the Democratic nomination, given everyone in the U.S. a million bucks, and still have money left over. Problem is that no one fact-checked the tweet. Or did a simple bit of mental arithmetic and figured out that, if you divvy up that  $500M by 327 million - the population of the U.S. - you don't get anywhere near a million for each of us. All those zeros in the numerator get canceled out by all those zeros in the denominator. Thus, if Bloomberg had chosen to give us all a share of what he was out of pocket on, we'd have all gotten $1.53 a piece.

Not that $1.53 is anything to sneeze into your elbow at. You can buy a Dunkin' donut, and have plenty of change left over. Or you can take a pass on the donut and if you can scrape up another 6 cents, you can get yourself a small coffee.

Still, it's nowhere near a million bucks.

There is, of course, plenty of innumeracy going around. How many people do you see in restaurants busting out their phones to calculate the tip? That is, how many people did you used to see in restaurants, back in the day.

My own encounter with math weirdness occurred the other day when I found a multi-pack of toilet paper at CVS and couldn't resist the urge to buy it. After all, one never knows when one is going to come across toilet paper, and even thought this isn't the kind of t.p. I normally purchase - I'm a Scott classic kind of gal - I figured it would be good to have in reserve. And even though it was an 18-pack, it was compact enough to fit into my tote bag.

What struck me, of course, were those odd little equations. I get that two of these smaller, ribbed rolls of Scott could conceivably be equivalent to one roll of Scott classic. But how does this turn 18 rolls into 36. Is it like the hygiene version of the loaves and fish?

And then I "ran the numbers". One roll of Scott classic has 1,000 sheets of t.p. One roll of Scott "Comfort Plus" contains 231 sheets. Hmmm. Rounding up (231 > 250) for ease of rule-of-thumbing, I found that four rolls of "Comfort Plus" are approximately equal in sheet count one roll of Scott 1,000.

This is, admittedly, an unfair comparison, as my regular Scott t.p. - I was going to say "plain vanilla", but who wants to think of t.p. as plain vanilla? - is single ply, far thinner than "Comfort Plus".  So presumably you use a lot less per trip to the loo.

I haven't conducted a field experiment yet, but I seriously doubt that one roll of "Comfort Plus" is going to last me as long as two rolls of my Scott. If this is, in fact, what 18 = 36 is supposed to mean.

And I'm totally thrown off by the picture of the big roll = two of the little rolls. If you map it to the 18 = 36 equation, you come away with one big roll is the equivalent of two "Comfort Plus" rolls. So which is it?

I should have plenty of time over tthe next couple of months spent sheltering in place to conduct an experiment here. And/or cogitating on the meaning of the arithmetic. Maybe I'll write to Scott and ask for an explanation. But what I'm most likely to do is put the 18 pack of "Comfort Plus" in the closet and forget about it entirely. Until I start running low on the real deal. Or in case I need it to barter for a pint of Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia Fro-yo.

And where's that million bucks Mike Bloomberg owes me???