Thirty-Eight

I just discovered that it’s customary to tip 15-20% of the pre-tax amount of the bill at restaurants in the United States. You may be surprised that I didn’t know that already. But the only part I didn’t know was the “pre-tax” part. I had always assumed it was on the total. It’s not.

My Rule-of-Thumb: $3 per $10 on the menu

Anyway, my standard rule-of-thumb still applies: I recommend paying $3 for every $10 that’s on the menu. That will pay for tax plus a good tip, rounded up a bit. I’ve created this chart that shows the actual numbers for some cities near where I live.

Although a 15% tip is considered acceptable, in larger metropolitan areas such as Southern California, a 20% tip is more standard. If you use my $3 rule, you’ll be tipping 12 cents higher than 20% on $10.

All of the cities in Orange County have a sales tax rate of 7.75% except La Habra. But even La Habra is cheaper than any Los Angeles County city. I recommend avoiding Pico Rivera and South Gate – they have the highest tax rate in the county. Maybe the whole state. Punish them for it by not eating in restaurants in those two cities.

A side note: when I was looking up the tax rates, the list of cities in Los Angeles County appeared to Google to need translating:

(From http://www.boe.ca.gov/cgi-bin/rates.cgi?LETTER=L&LIST=COUNTY)

This morning I got up early to see a total lunar eclipse, and it was the best one I’ve ever seen. When I first heard about it last night, I was initially disappointed that I live in a part of the world where the moon would set in the middle of the eclipse. Here’s a map from NASA, showing where this morning’s eclipse was visible:

If you live in Australia or most of Asia, the entire eclipse was visible. As I said, I was initially disappointed that I could not see the whole thing, but then when I got up and watched it for half an hour, I realized that I was privileged to see the phenomenon of the moon completely disappearing.

If you see a total eclipse of the moon in the middle of the night in a dark location, you can still see the moon. It turns dark red. However, when I started watching the moon around 6:00 a.m. Pacific Time (from the Amtrak station in Buena Park, California), I saw the last part of the moon enter the shadow then as dawn broke, the dark moon became less and less visible, even though it was still above the horizon. At 6:33 a.m., the greatest eclipse, I could not even see the moon at all. I knew where it was in the sky, and it hadn’t set yet, but the sky had gotten so bright and the moon so dark that it completely disappeared. The reason I say it’s the best one I’ve ever seen is because in an eclipse, it’s fun to watch the moon become less and less visible. And this time, it went completely away.

It didn’t hurt that I was wearing my glasses which are slightly out of date, rather than my contact lenses which I usually wear. Then I got cold and went back to bed.

Yesterday we got this letter delivered to our house:

We live on Sycamore Lane in Buena Park, California, this was addressed to Sycamore Drive in Sunnynook, Auckland, New Zealand. I looked it up: that’s off by 6517 miles (10,489 kilometers).

I wonder what is the world record distance for incorrectly delivered mail? 6517 miles is certainly the longest distance I’ll personally experience in my lifetime, but I suppose in the course of human history, there might have been a letter delivered to Spain instead of New Zealand, or vice versa. Those two countries are “antipodal” (see my web page about antipode maps) and are the maximum farthest distance away.

So actually, if this letter had been delivered to somewhere along the MA-8403 road near Ronda, Spain (Google Map link), that would be the farthest possible distance.

I’ve posted a link to Biola’s CLass Schedule for next semester. Here’s the link:

http://quickstream.biola.edu/distancelearning/201030_Spring_2011/Classes.html

Biola just recently started using the Banner system for registration, and I got annoyed that their list was so spread out over multiple pages. So I made the above list with.