Taste testing.

Recently, I've been validating truths from Malcom Gladwell's Blink.
If you haven't read it, you're missing out- it's about the instantaneous judgements our minds make without our conscious involvement, and it's absolutely fascinating- definitely one of the most thought-provoking books I read last year (excluding classic literature).

I really want to test a theory from the book concerning taste testing. Everybody has that friend, you know, the one who boasts he can tell the difference between two almost perfectly identical soda pop brands? 7UP and Sprite, Mountain Dew and Mountain Maze, etc...well, this'll throw him. He may win in a simple identification taste test- I mean, it's a 50-50 shot, and that probability is essentially what it comes down to. So try this- triangulate the test. Use three cups of soda, and make two the same and one different. Have him identify which cup holds a different soda than the other two (harder than it sounds), and then have him identify which soda it is. This reduces the odds of a blindly correct guess to roughly 16.6% (1/3 times 1/2).

Awesome.