Wednesday 30 September 2009

Here Are The Facts Redux

Having completed another go-around on the milkshake carousel, it's time to once again collate data. What fun!

First up: the updated chart of shake quality by category.

At this point it seems we're seeing the various groupings balancing each other out; aside from chocolate and (arguably) cakes, the categories appear fairly similar (fruit took a particular beating this time round thanks to the truly abysmal pineapple shake). This may set the pattern for the future, thanks to the law of large numbers, though I would hate to mangle my presentation of statistics to the point where I implied 3 was in any sense large. Naturally, chocolate remains what is known in the trade as "an outlier of awesome".

We now turn to the updated shake quality deviation graph.

Biscuits and breakfast cereals are the biggest winners here. The twin nightmares of pineapple and blackjack have massively widened the quality deviation for fruit and sweets respectively, both of which were until now highly regarded categories. Chocolate remains powerful, but cakes are now clearly the most dependable category, as well as scoring highly overall.

Finally, we consider the overall satisfaction I am experiencing with the experiment as a whole.


As this chart demonstrates, there is a slight but noticeable downward drift in my enjoyment as the experiment goes on. Had I not been fortunate in my last two choices, the drift might be even more prominent. Alas, I see the coming day when all acceptable shake flavours have been sampled, and only a morass of mediocrity remains, punctuated occasionally by moments of pure revulsion.

Truly, I must suffer to bring enlightenment to my readers.

In conclusion: cakes are solid and dependably delicious, chocolate continues to do the business, and breakfast cereal seems to have overtaken sweets in a result that defies all conceivable laws of reality. Oh, and this series may not be long for this world, since as a general rule if I'm going to be putting on weight I'd rather it not involve drinking concoctions more suited to Snape's potions class than anything else.

5 comments:

Chemie said...

What potions are you particularly scared of?

SpaceSquid said...

It'll be a cold day in Hell when I try parma violets.

Chemie said...

I once drank a very nice wine that tasted of parma violets. Is it only the parma violets? I think 1 shake would be an acceptable error in your data gathering, but 2 might damage the validity of your conclusions.

SpaceSquid said...

There's also marmite, but that goes without saying.

Dan Edmunds said...

Surely in order for this to be a fair test you need to determine the next shake purely randomly. If your deliberately avoiding shakes then that’s clearly going to skew that category towards the positive. I no longer have faith in your statistical analysis…