Minimizing Surface Area of a piece of bread

[slightlydead]

Say you're given a big semi-sphere loaf of bread. It has a volume of 32 fluid ounces and a serving size of 2. What would be the best way to eat this bread and minimize the surface area exposed of the bread to prevent it from going stale faster?

I'm asking this question cause I have a tasty pumpernickel bread right next to me.

[mike-l]

How big is a bite?

[++$_]

Cut your slice, then put it in an impermeable bag and close it. This artificially reduces the surface area.

If that isn't an option, I'm pretty sure you do best by just making one slice straight across the bread, though I don't exactly have an elegant proof.

[eta oin shrdlu]

Along the same lines as ++$_: Make a planar cut, then store the bread on the cutting board with the sliced surface downward. (I do this with the bread I bake; it works pretty well.)

[The Geoff]

Compress the bread into a sphere after cutting your portion each time, surely?

[Giallo]

You can do better:

Cut the bread in a lot of little pieces.
Recompose them and get two breads the same size of the original.
Eat one of them, sell the other.
Profit.

[pizzazz]

5 is a lot?

[PM 2Ring]

5 is a lot?

Yes.

From KA's Q&A. This week: The bottom of reality unseeable?

[...]
A more mathematical example is boundary layer flow over a flat plate. Basically, the flow profile looks kind of like the right side of the letter U. At the flat plate, the no-slip condition applies, and the velocity is 0. As you get farther above the plate, the velocity increases, but it only increases as high as the free-stream velocity.

Formally, if you construct this system non-dimensionally (so instead of height in centimeters or whatever, we just normalize it to "units"), then the boundary layer flow only approaches free-stream flow in the limit to infinity.

Practically, however, we know this not to be the case, and we observe a point when the boundary layer flow is equal to the free stream flow within, say, 99.5%. The difference in velocity at that point can be considered to be negligible (we couldn't even measure it if we tried).

As it turns out, you don't need to go out to infinity for this case. All you need to do is go about 5 units above the flat plate to observe a 99.999999% match with free-stream. So, in that case, infinity and 5 are effectively indistinguishable.

* ponders the shape of a knife capable of doing a 5 part Banach–Tarski decomposition... *

[Talith]

Spoiler:

5 is a lot?

Yes.

From KA's Q&A. This week: The bottom of reality unseeable?

[...]
A more mathematical example is boundary layer flow over a flat plate. Basically, the flow profile looks kind of like the right side of the letter U. At the flat plate, the no-slip condition applies, and the velocity is 0. As you get farther above the plate, the velocity increases, but it only increases as high as the free-stream velocity.

Formally, if you construct this system non-dimensionally (so instead of height in centimeters or whatever, we just normalize it to "units"), then the boundary layer flow only approaches free-stream flow in the limit to infinity.

Practically, however, we know this not to be the case, and we observe a point when the boundary layer flow is equal to the free stream flow within, say, 99.5%. The difference in velocity at that point can be considered to be negligible (we couldn't even measure it if we tried).

As it turns out, you don't need to go out to infinity for this case. All you need to do is go about 5 units above the flat plate to observe a 99.999999% match with free-stream. So, in that case, infinity and 5 are effectively indistinguishable.

* ponders the shape of a knife capable of doing a 5 part Banach–Tarski decomposition... *

Well really you need an infinitely fine laser and an infinite precision rotation machine...... should be possible