Sometimes, I can be real pain to eat with. There are a ton of things I hate, including some common favorites like onions, mushrooms, turnip, parsnip, rhubarb. On the other hand, there are a ton of things I love including chicken noodle soup, hotdogs, nanaimo bars, blueberries, and olives.
However, I know someone who doesn’t really hate anything. And there really isn’t that much on the love list either. Try cooking a favorite meal for someone whose tastebuds put everything right in the middle of the normal curve!
This is how I discovered that tastebuds are just one more human characteristic that apply nicely to the idea of kurtosis. My tastebuds are extremely platykurtic with lots of things on both extremes of the curve. And other folks have taste buds that are extremely leptokurtic with lots of things at the middle of curve.
I have a silly way of remember which is which. “Plat”ykurtic sounds a lot like “Flat,” which is even more fun if you say it like “Flat like your head” direct from the Bugs Bunny cartoon where Bugs tries to convince Columbus about the shape of the earth. And then, if you still need a way to remember “Lept”okurtic, just remember that someone who lept had to jump really high. Today’s statistics lesson has been brought to you by the number blue and the letter 7.
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What if I like many things a lot, and dislike few things? I guess skew may be as important as kurtosis.
Yup, skew matters! You’re a positive skew. I’m think i’m fairly normal….. in the statistical sense
How do you say “I like a lot of stuff a lot, I dislike very little stuff, and there’s little I’m neutral about”?
Ah, you’re highly positively skewed.