# I was wrong…(Oreos, cont.)

This Oreo thing has gotten out of hand. Here is where we stand (with surprise dénouement at the end):

@JWDixonizer observed via Twitter that it must be volume that is doubled. I tried to refute that, but could not. Here are five manufactured Double Stuf Oreos next to five made the old-fashioned way.

The Double Stuf come out a tad shorter, but within any reasonable margin of error. Ergo, Double Stuf has double the volume of stuf. In an appearance that delights me no end, Al Sicherman himself confirms this:

My best evidence [that Double Stuf is in fact double stuf] follows not from all that pointless weighing but from noting that a stack of nine Double Stufs is approximately the same height as 11 originals: about 5 3/16 inches.

Sicherman then establishes his own system of equations and finds the stuf in a regular Oreo to measure approx. 0.1 inches and the stuf in a Double Stuf Oreo to measure approx. 0.2 inches.

But double volume doesn’t mean it’s Double Stuf.

Consider the case of whipped cream. Or popcorn.

Then Chris Lusto did an analysis. He argued that Nutrition Facts constitute imprecise data, and that we shouldn’t be surprised by conflicting results from two imprecise systems.

But Lusto didn’t touch any cookies in his first go. He didn’t measure mass and he didn’t run computations on fat grams.

Al Sicherman did. Not only that, he thought to measure the diameters of the wafers. I paired them up and they looked fine to me. But he lined up 10 regular wafers and 10 Double Stuf wafers. He claims to have photographic evidence that Double Stuf wafers have a larger diameter.

I have yet to run the numbers on this observation.

# Hold the presses!

In a late development, Lusto has cracked the case.

After taking grief for his hands-off approach to Oreo research, Lusto busted out a scale and honed his stuf-scraping techniques. He has now demonstrated definitively that Double Stuf is doubly stuffed.

I am humbled and chagrined. It turns out the Triple-Double really is a different beast. That chocolate stuf is deceptive.

On the plus side, if you solve the system of mass equations,

$\begin{cases} 10w+10s=113 \\ 20w+20s=145 \end{cases}$

the solution matches Lusto’s finding: One stuf weighs a bit more than 3 grams.

So there’s that.