How many of them could there possibly be?
So you're at the grocery store waiting in line to pay for your groceries and then you see them screaming out at you.
12 ways to please your man! 50 new positions! 13 secrets that will drive him crazy in bed!
Have you ever stopped and wondered how many could there possibly be? You have a gaggle of women's magazine that promise secret, after secret each and every month. But seriously, how many could there possibly be?
Maybe I'm just ignorant, not hip with the times or something like that. But I decided to analyze this further (yes, I am a geek):
- Take 5 women's magazine, that publish on a monthly basis.
- Each one publishes a random number of secrets each month between 1 and 10...let's be generous, between 0 and 7.
- What is the average number of secrets in a year? Standard deviation? (Astute readers who are familiar with uniform probability distributions already know the answer to that one).
Here's what I did, I modeled this as a simulation in Excel.
I ran this simulation 60,000 times, and here is what I found:
average 210
std deviation 62
max 408
min 0
probability of max 0.01%
probability of min 0.01%
So ask yourself, can there really be more than 200 secrets out there? Seriously, can there be? And this is only for 5 women's magazines, last time I checked there were more than 5 women's magazines out there.
Tags: humor (please tell me someone found that a little funny)
4 comments:
Hm, I never looked at it like that. But then again, I don't think ANYONE has looked at it like that. The power of statistics shows us that it's all bullcrap. Nice post.
I forgot to mention: the average number of secrets is random, i.e.
=randbetween(0,7). That's why its a simulation.
I think there are probably billions of secrets out there. Granted the fact that 12% of doctors pee in the shower is hardly relevant to anyone's love life. Most of what magazines print is recycled advice and paraphrased studies.
The quantification makes information accessible as well as sounding authoritative.
If I say "this song sucks in second of five ways a song can truly suck" people will immediately qeustion me on my classification schema.
And yes I do occasionally make up numbers like that. :P
Ah, but once the magazine publishes them, surely they aren't secrets anymore! But how to count the repeats?
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