On my first day of University five years ago, whilst shopping for dorm supplies, I bought this large beer-and-hockey themed piggy bank. Since then, I have deposited any coins smaller than a quarter (ie pennies, nickels and dimes). Today, just 2 weeks shy of moving to the US to start grad school, was time to finally cash in.
2L bottle provided for size-comparison.
Before counting, I wanted to see if I could reasonably estimate how much money there would be. I considered doing a “random sample” approach, counting the value of a small portion and scaling up to the full weight. However, unfortunately the only means at my disposal to weigh the samples was a bathroom scale inteded for weighing people in 0.1kg increments, so I didn’t think this would be accurate enough. Instead I weighed the entire piggy-bank (which came out to an impressive 4.2kg) and made some simple estimations of what the relative proportions of the coins would be as so:
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