Wednesday 16 September 2009

Shake #19: The Unshaking

Today's shake: Pineapple

Taste: 1
Texture: 5
Synergy: 2
Scorn: 4
Total Score: 3.5

General Comments: For a few minutes after beginning to drink this shake I was terrified that analysis would be impossible. Apparently, whatever scale exists for the assessment of tastes, pineapple and vanilla lie on exact opposite sides of the centre from each other, and their combination thus tastes of nothing at all. It was like drinking heavy air.

Naturally, this led to an argument over what Taste score to give something that literally cannot be tasted. 0 is not an acceptable answer, for as we know from our Puddleglum, at least if it tastes of nothing it can't taste terrible. Nor can we reach for 5, simply because it is the halfway ground between the best and worst possible tastes (one would surely not give 2.5 stars to a movie with no sound or visuals). There is no proof that taste as a variable behaves linearly, and regardless 5 has already been used as the value assigned to the Control Shake, maple syrup.

Fortunately, this dilemma was eventually resolved when it was discovered that in fact a taste was present, and building up in slivers with each successive sip. Said taste was foul beyond description, so disgusting in fact that the shake was abandoned unfinished, a terrible breach of both experimental procedure and my Yorkshire heritage, but nevertheless necessary. Avoid this shake at all costs.

3 comments:

Tomsk said...

You could assign NaN. Might play havoc with your statistics though...

Jamie said...

But... how can anything involving pineapple be bad? Does not compute...

Dan Edmunds said...

I hate pineapple. That is all.