Probability Primavera

I can’t believe that’s the title I’m going with, but it’s got alliteration, and it’s an accurate description of what I’m thinking on, so, here we are.

Spring is a great time to get in touch with how terribly-evolved we are as far as relating our own experience of variability to an accurate picture of reality. A few days of high or low temps, whatever that means, a very short memory about what last year was like, maybe a few snowflakes, a sptting-rain / 36 degree combo and we start saying things like, “WHAT THE HECK IS THIS I THOUGHT IT WAS SPRING??!?!”, or “OH THANK GOODNESS WINTER IS OVER AND IT WILL ONLY BE NICE FROM NOW ON!” I mean, maybe. My money’s on your simian brain having a limited ability to generalize from your own experience to larger weather trends, but that’s just me: proud and cognizant of my monkey heritage.

When I worked in retail analytics, one of the topics that I always wanted to dig into but never got up the energy for was a model of single-day events on perceptions of weather during Spring and Fall. What everyone’s going to tell you is, “When it’s warm, people shop for swimsuits,” and while that’s obviously true to some extent, what I was really interested in was “By observing shopping behavior, can I determine how people decide that ‘It’s warm’?” Because I think it’s possible that one 65 degree day in March might do the trick, as opposed to climbing slowly through the 50’s in April.

Point is, I got the SuperCub out of the basement today, so it is fully spring.