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It's not just taste, it's color too.
Aug. 5th, 2006 05:12 pmJoel just doesn't understand that eating M&M's isn't just a matter of taste, but one of color, too. It does matter whether the blue ones get eaten before the reds, and it's important whether or not he comits the cardinal sin of eating the green ones, and saying "but they all taste the same" doesn't even answer the right question. It's completely beside the point. You HAVE to eat the blue ones before the dark brown, and then after the dark brown the yellow, then the orange, then the red, and only THEN do you get to eat the green. If you're lucky and you've got one of the types which, although it has that bastard blue color, still retains the lovely light brown, they go between red and green. This is important.
Having a preference ordering on the colors of M&M's is important to break the deadlock faced with opening a new bag. It's like the axiom of choice. If you are faced with an unordered set, how on earth do you chose which element to pick first? There's no reason to prefer any particular M&M over any other, and so you've no way to distinguish between them. Without a preference order on the bag, you'll end up not being able to eat any of them! (And so why did you buy the bag in the first place?). Joel's blithe response is to "just stick your hand in and pull out whatever one you get." Well, what if it's green? What if you end up eating all the green ones first, and you're stuck with those horrid blues? Or, not so bad but still bad, an ugly mixture of yellow and brown. That would ruin the experience of eating M&M's, looking into a bag and seeing nothing but blue and brown, and KNOWING that you could've had green, but, no, you ate them all already. How awful would that be?
Color matters. That's all there is to it. So don't you dare eat my green M&M's. (And is it just me, or are there ALWAYS fewer green ones in the bag than any other color? I've gotten bags from vending machines which have only had three green ones! That's not proportional at all.)
Having a preference ordering on the colors of M&M's is important to break the deadlock faced with opening a new bag. It's like the axiom of choice. If you are faced with an unordered set, how on earth do you chose which element to pick first? There's no reason to prefer any particular M&M over any other, and so you've no way to distinguish between them. Without a preference order on the bag, you'll end up not being able to eat any of them! (And so why did you buy the bag in the first place?). Joel's blithe response is to "just stick your hand in and pull out whatever one you get." Well, what if it's green? What if you end up eating all the green ones first, and you're stuck with those horrid blues? Or, not so bad but still bad, an ugly mixture of yellow and brown. That would ruin the experience of eating M&M's, looking into a bag and seeing nothing but blue and brown, and KNOWING that you could've had green, but, no, you ate them all already. How awful would that be?
Color matters. That's all there is to it. So don't you dare eat my green M&M's. (And is it just me, or are there ALWAYS fewer green ones in the bag than any other color? I've gotten bags from vending machines which have only had three green ones! That's not proportional at all.)
