Let’s say you’ve got yourself a little diner in the States.

You want to offer pie to your customers, but you’re running a low budget operation, so you can only offer one particular type of pie. To figure out what kind of pie you should sell, you ask some of your regular customers what their favourite pie is, but you get a whole bunch of different answers: pumpkin, key lime, pecan, lemon meringue, tart cherry served heated up with a scoop of vanilla icecream on the side, etc.

That leaves you without much to go on, so instead you ask these same customers to fill out a little survey ranking ten different pies in descending order of preference. You find, looking at the data, that although no one actually picked it as their favourite, apple pie ends up being the one that averages out to being the least objectionable and most consistently “okay” with people. So you decide to serve apple pie, and thanks to your maths and research, it ends up selling better than any other pie you may have chosen instead… even though it isn’t any of your regular’s actual favourite.

I’m pretty sure this is exactly why apple remains the flavour that McDonald’s consistently sells while the other couple flavours they offer rotates throughout the year. [Read more…]

Well, tomorrow I’m turning the ripe old age of twenty-eight years old, successfully having survived the dreaded year-of-rock-and-roll-death, and a few readers have lately been poking a bit into the question of what an amazing wonderful elderly spinster like me would want for her birthday. While obviously treating the question as anything other than rhetorical would be silly, I thought it might be fun to do some daydreaming and take a little stroll around the web to point out some of the awesome, must-have items for every discerning skeptical transsexual ex-junkie feminist atheist. I’m sure my readers have MANY such people in their lives they may need to shop for, so why not provide a little guide? [Read more…]