Maccas - definitive proof it's flavour-free

In a vain effort to prove I'm not a one-trick pony,I'm going to post something completely unrelated to religion. I won't mention the "r" word again in this post, promise.

This post is about McDonald's - just how tasty is it, and how can we know? Well, my contribution to this burgeoning field of intellectual endeavour is as follows. If you've been to an Aussie McDonald's recently, you might have noticed this on the underside of your burger lid:


For the benefit of search engines, it reads:

(18,000,000 x 2.2) x 4 = [(mmmmmmmmmmmm))^3 x 10^8]^10

If there are 2.2 pounds in a kilogram and McDonald's Australia bought 18,000,000 kilograms of beef last year, how many Quarter Pounders is that? Well? Maybe you should just get back to your burger. But think about this - all of that 100% pure beef came from Aussie farmers; like Will Abel-Smith, whose family company has been farming beef across Australia for 120 years. So when it comes to our beef, it's Australia day, every day, at McDonald's

The math-head in me can't help but observe that it's relatively trivial to solve for 'm' in the equation above. Let's do that first, and then try to interpret what this might mean. First up, mmmmmmmmmmmm can be trivially simplified:

From there, it's simply a matter of arithmetic manipulation:

This yields (via Windows Calculator, which is utterly inappropriate for this, given the size of the numbers involved versus the precision of the IEEE floating point spec):

Given we're dealing with numbers on the order of 10 to the 80 (i.e. 10 followed by 80 zeros), 0.59 is within a margin of error for:

So, the big question is, what does this mean? I see two options:

Conclusion 1 - no beef

From the text ("if there are 2.2 pounds in a kilogram and McDonald's Australia bought 18,000,000 kilograms of beef last year..."), the left-hand side is apparently referring to pounds of beef. With my best woo judgement, I proclaim 'm' to be the amount of beef in one burger. Therefore, we can tentatively conclude there is no beef in a quarter pounder.

Conclusion 2 - no flavour

The right-hand side refers to variable mmmmmmmmmmmm, which I originally simplified to m^12. However, we can equally write this as (mmm)(mmm)(mmm)(mmm), where mmm is must mean 'mmm, this burger tastes great'. So, perhaps the equation is the amount of flavour. We originally solved m = 0, so clearly:

That is, Quarter Pounders are flavourless.

Thus, with utter certainty, we proclaim that Quarter Pounders are beef-free and flavourless. But then you probably knew that anyway.