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The Orange Smartie Conspiracy Theory

If you know me well, you might know that sometimes I can be a little OCD. Especially when it comes to food. For example, at each of our favourite restaurants, I have a favourite dish that I pretty much order each time we visit. If I said I was feeling like Singapore Laksa or Prawn Pad Thai or Udon Noodle Soup for dinner, Andrew would know where we were eating. (NyoNya, Thai takeaway or Feng Sushi.)

I also get stuck on chocolate bars. Sometimes in the afternoons, I like to award myself a little treat. It helps me get through three o'clock syndrome (why is 3pm such a struggle?). When I started my new contract, I was going through a smarties phase. I like the chocolate in smarties better than M&Ms and they seem to last longer than a chocolate bar. In the UK, the orange smarties are jaffa flavoured and are a bit of a treat. I would always save them to eat last. After eating a few packets of smarties, I noticed that there always seemed to be less orange smarties than the other colours. I wondered if this was actually the case. Were there always less orange smarties? I decided I should find out.

So, for 30 days, I counted the colours in my smarties packets. I recorded the information in a spreadsheet. Never one to do things by halves, I also created a graph.


smarties-small


oooooer, pretty colours...

The results? Well the results are inconclusive. In the beginning I was averaging around 2 orange smarties per packet. Then I swapped to a different batch and suddenly I was averaging 5 orange smarties per packet. At the end, and another batch, I was back down to 2 orange smarties. Maybe it depends on how the orange smartie machine is feeling on the day of distribution. (I'd do another 30 days of data collection but I'm beginning to feel a bit meh about smarties.) In the beginning, my theory was orange smarties cost more to make because of the flavouring. I wonder if that's true.

Each day I've been declaring my orange smartie count on Twitter and the Twitter community have also become interested in the project. (They probably just think I'm a bit of a nerd.) One friend, who is a primary school teacher, even got his kids to do the same experiment. I'm waiting to hear his results.

Some smarties trivia:
  • Purple is the colour that appeared most frequently with an average of 5 per pack.

  • The most of any one colour in a pack was 11 purple smarties. I also got 10 yellow smarties in one pack on two occassions.

  • After orange (average of 3 a pack), blue is the colour that appears least frequently.

  • I had two packs that had no (zero!) orange smarties. Pink was the only other colour that failed to appear in a pack.

  • The averages were: orange 2.9, blue 3.6, pink 4.1, purple 5.0, yellow 4.4, green 4.7, brown 3.9, red 4.0.



jess - 26th Nov 2008, 22:09 tags: nerd_alert ocd food nablopomo08 nablopomo graph

 

Comments (14):

Caitlin says:
27th Nov 2008, 09:31
That's hilarious! You took me at my word and graphed it! (Maybe you were going to do it anyway). It's a bit hard to make out the colours. Maybe you could work out the average of all the other colours and then have a graph comparing orange to the average? Anyway, very cool. Love your work.
Nat says:
27th Nov 2008, 10:58
I think you should send this information to smarties! Based on the averages, you have some conclusive data! *orange sucks* :) Caitlin - Knowing Jess, she's a huge nerdy grapher. <a href="http://fushmush.net/n/312">She once graphed</a> the amount of alcohol she consumes when I went home for a visit. <a href="http://fushmush.net/n/312">http://fushmush.net/i/miscellaneous/nat-drinks-graphic.jpg</a> :)
Neerav says:
27th Nov 2008, 11:19
Have you ever watched the TV show Monk Jess? You would love it, its about a obsessive compulsive ex-cop turned police consultant
Tash says:
27th Nov 2008, 11:30
OCD!!?? A little!! I think this is more than just simple little OCD!!! A ha ha ha ha! It tells me that you just don't have enough to do at work! I WISH I had time to count the colours in a smartie packet!! "Working" the UK - god I will it!! And now your feeling meh about smarties!! A ha ha ha! You're hilarious!
Char says:
27th Nov 2008, 11:36
lol, Love it!! I'd definitely noticed less blue... Not fair that our orange ones aren't jaffa-flavoured, that would be great :)
empika says:
27th Nov 2008, 21:56
Great post! I really need to write that web app for easy smartie tracking, maybe then we could get a larger sample group for more accurate results. :D
Vijay says:
28th Nov 2008, 01:57
If you could put up the data as a CSV or XLS file, I would like to do a bit of statistical analysis on the data if you don't mind :) A bit of linear regression.
Pi3832 says:
28th Nov 2008, 02:05
Yes, please publish the data. There are many potential analyses to be done, e.g., colour ratios, predictive algorithms, etc.
herminator says:
28th Nov 2008, 02:53
* Number of smarties per pack: 33 * Number of colors: 8 * Expected number of smarties per color: 12.5% (4.125) * Sample size: 30 (days) * 33 (smarties) = 990 * Standard error: sqrt((0.125 * 0.875) / 990) = 0.0105 = 1.05% * 99% confidence interval: 2.58*1.05 = +/- 2.7% (+/- 0.9 smarties) So with this sample size, and assuming that each color is roughly equally likely, We'd be 99% sure to see a color between 9.8% and 15.2% of the time. Multiplying by 33 gives the expected number per pack, which would be between 3.2 and 5.0 So the 2.9 for Orange is definitely an outlier, and would indicate that not all smarties are created equal :-) DISCLAIMER: I am not a professional statistician.
jess says:
28th Nov 2008, 04:12
thanks for all your comments. Loving that I'm not the only nerd (and definitely not the most knowledgable nerd) out there. For those of you who've asked for the data. I'll put a link to it at the end of the post.
emma says:
29th Nov 2008, 13:36
Did you know that there haven't always been blue smarties? I remember when they came out: you couldn't not - there was a big ad campaign! Orange smarties are my favourite. I'm disappointed they don't make them orange flavoured here.
emma says:
29th Nov 2008, 13:37
Did you know that there haven't always been blue smarties? I remember when they came out: you couldn't not - there was a big ad campaign! Orange smarties are my favourite. I'm disappointed they don't make them orange flavoured here.
emma says:
29th Nov 2008, 13:42
PS Just checked Wikipedia -and I remember there being light brown smarties as well. Here's what Wikipedia said: In one of the earlier ranges of colours, there was a light-brown Smartie. This was replaced in 1988 by the blue Smartie. Before 1958, the dark-brown Smarties had a plain-chocolate centre, while the light-brown one tasted of coffee. The orange Smarties contained, and still contain in the UK, orange-flavoured chocolate. [1] (check out wikipedia for more nerdy facts. i love it) I also remember Snickers being called Marathons, Milky Ways being brown in the middle (like they are still in Australia) - they went like the white European ones a few years back, peanut m and ms being calle Treets (I think), highland toffee, wham bars, i could go on.... i spent a lot of childhood time deliberating over what to spend my pocket money on!!
Natalie says:
7th Mar 2010, 22:10
hey ya i work in a milkshake shop and make shakes from smarties i think i might just carry on your smartie reserch
comments closed

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