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New Years Eve held the Coke/Pepsi 3-shot challenge pitting the discerning palettes of my guests against a gauntlet of samples.  The preponderance of guests stated they’d be able to tell them apart at a statistically significant level.

Purpose: Determine if a tester can accurately identify samples of Coke or Pepsi when presented in lots of three.  Success will be defined as properly identifying all samples in six of nine lots of three.

Protocol:

  1. A pseudorandom sequence of ones and zeros were generated as the seed data.  Zeros were Coke samples and ones were Pepsi samples.
  2. Cups were numbered sequentially and filled with approximately 1-2 oz of the appropriate beverage as listed.
  3. Testers were allowed to take calibration samples of each beverage from a control bottle.
  4. Each tester received 3 sequential cups and after sampling, received a data sheet requesting the cup number and the corresponding observation.
  5. To be statistically significant, each tester had to consume 9 sets, but after much bitching and complaining, we stopped at 7.

Results: After 108 samples tested, approximately 50 samples were properly identified breaking the Colobus Barrier.  Of the 36 lots tested, only 3 went 3 for 3 correctly identifying samples, once again doing worse than chance.  No tester was able to identify samples at a level above chance.

Considerations/Stuff People Bitched About: The soda was flat; each specimen was poured from a bottle that had been open within the previous 30 minutes.  The soda was warm; this was done specifically at the request of Pat Toye and may have partially caused the previous accusation of flatness.

Interlab Repeatability: If anyone would like to stage a repeat under similar conditions with a changed variable of temperature, brands, specimen (cup) size, participants or tester, please contact me.

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I’ve been doing some investigation into the EPA over the last year or so and found an amazing opinion from the Circuit Court for DC regarding daily pollution rates. The EPA had said that “Daily” was merely a construct and pollution could be calculated on a seasonal or annual basis. The Court shot back with the following:

“Daily” connotes “every day.” See Webster’s Third
New International Dictionary 570 (1993) (defining “daily” to
mean “occurring or being made, done, or acted upon every
day”). Doctors making daily rounds would be of little use to
their patients if they appeared seasonally or annually. And no
one thinks of “[g]ive us this day our daily bread” as a prayer for
sustenance on a seasonal or annual basis. Matthew 6:11 (King
James).

I have no idea how to properly cite this so I’m just going to link to the original.

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I found the following in an Economist.com article on why kids can’t read:

No question, without a wimpy GUI, computers would never have become as popular as they are today. The command-line interface—with its forbidding prompt and blinking cursor—required mastering a whole catechism of arcane instructions that only a priesthood of computerdom could cherish.

When “root@computername:~# shutdown -h now” could be replaced by a simple click of a mouse to switch off a computer, novices of all ages and backgrounds could climb aboard the digital bandwagon.

via Economist.com 

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I found the following in an Economist.com article on why kids can’t read:

No question, without a wimpy GUI, computers would never have become as popular as they are today. The command-line interface—with its forbidding prompt and blinking cursor—required mastering a whole catechism of arcane instructions that only a priesthood of computerdom could cherish.

When “root@computername:~# shutdown -h now” could be replaced by a simple click of a mouse to switch off a computer, novices of all ages and backgrounds could climb aboard the digital bandwagon.

via Economist.com 

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Over the last semester, on Mondays and Wednesdays I’d stop for lunch on my way to school at some fast food vendor and put the napkin I got above the passenger visor.  If I got a note or something I’d jam it in there too and a day or two ago I took out the pile as it reached about 3 inches thick and about 60 napkins over 20 weeks.

I felt like a geologist.  There were strata formed by napkins as you could tell when someone had a lunch deal because there’d be four Arby’s napkins in a row during the Roastbeefian period followed by several Burger King napkins after the Nuggetine extinction which preceded the $2 Whopper Tuesday Epoch.  I was able to get absolute dating on some points because of two parking tickets.   I’m curious if the same phenomenon occurs with center consoles and other hidden stack places.

Do you have any crap chronologies?

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I purchased a Yoohoo today and saw a new label on it “99% caffeine free”.  If this implies that it’s 1% caffeine that’s 4.5 mL of caffeine or 5500 mg of caffeine or the equivalent of 68 Red Bulls or 27 caffeine tablets, in other words just enough to kill an adult.  Should this bear fruit, Yoohoo may become my poison of choice.

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I integrated google analytics into the OSR page to see where people were going and hopefully create better navigation tools. I looked at the map showing usage patterns by locations and found this:

OSR webpage usage

A near perfect T. Middle America (both horizontally and largely vertically) hates us.

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I integrated google analytics into the OSR page to see where people were going and hopefully create better navigation tools. I looked at the map showing usage patterns by locations and found this:

OSR webpage usage

A near perfect T. Middle America (both horizontally and largely vertically) hates us.