A statistical analysis of iPod earphones

I recently got an iPod Nano (4 GB) on my birthday. 2 months ago. Like most other owners of iPods, I am in absolute awe of its perfect sound reproduction capabilities and the sheer size of it. Its like a monster truck fitted into a HotWheels model. Or a Donald Neamen fitted into a Katre (Mumbai University engineers would understand). Or like a 2.5 litre bottle of Pepsi squeezed into a 500 ml bottle. Not that I like Pepsi particularly, but it somewhat fits my analogy.

But then, there is the tiny quirk that you feel Apple would have taken care of. The earphones.

I'm not complaining about the sound quality, the colour, the ruggedness or the fact that they aren't easily replaceable.

I'm here to complain that every time I pick up my earphones (to put them into my ears), I always seem to get the Left (L) earphone in my right hand, and vice versa. This amounts to a lot of further physical work in interchanging the earphones from one hand to the other, then putting them in the ears. Ofcourse, I could cross my hands and put them in that way, but if you'd bother to try it out, it is a very uncomfortable thing to be doing in public, especially with my level of clumsiness.

Is this just my imagination or a fact? Like most of my insane conjectures, the only way to solve this question was through prolonged testing over a period of time, in different situations. Stastistics would provide me the answer to this question.

N -> Earphones in the wrong hands (as in my own hands, but the left-right thing is messed up)
Y -> Earphones in the right hands (as in my own hands, but the left earphone is in my left hand and so on)



From the data,

Probability of getting the right earplugs= 0.45.

You can see the extremely disturbing nature of these findings. It means that 55 out of every 100 times I use my iPod, I will have to do the earplug shuffle. I would have been satisfied with a 0.5 or greater probability, but 0.45 is just not good enough.

Another observation is that groups of 3 consecutive N's occurred 16 times, compared to only 8 times in case of Y's. Horrible news for frequent earplug removers.

I encourage fellow iPodders to confirm my findings with similar experiments.