[untitled #423]

By Todd Stadler · Thursday, September 5, 2002 2:31pm

A high school student e-mailed me today with the results of an experiment her class had done involving how Hershey's kisses land when tossed.

The experiment was apparently designed to teach the students about mean, median, and mode, that stalwart troika of high school statistics.

Their teacher, for reasons not clear to me, wanted them to e-mail their results to a "stranger out-of-state", and this student picked me because of my involvement in the T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project.

I was intrigued by the students' results that indicated that Hershey's Kisses land on their base (the flat part) 25% of the time. So I did a thought experiment, reduced variables when possible, and, lacking an actual Hershey's Kiss to measure and observe, guessed a bit.

After a period of time that most people would easily deride as "too long", indicative as it was of "too much free time", I came up with a number that was pretty close to the observed 25% probability of a Kiss landing on its base. So that was fun, if pointless. I dare say the two are related.