Cats or Dogs

Cats or Dogs is a website that asks people to select among various either-or choices, cross-tabulate them, and indicate how much one choice is a predictor of the other.

Some of the predictions are pretty obvious. For example, one of the crosstabs (party vs. politician) concludes (χ² = 38.8, “extremely significant”):

People who prefer Republicans to Democrats are 4.3 times more likely to prefer Bush to Hillary.

People who prefer Democrats to Republicans are 46.0 times more likely to prefer Hillary to Bush.

Other results are interesting. For example, beer and wine drinkers have different preferences for their color of wine (χ² = 7.9, “very significant”):

People who prefer wine to beer are 7.5 times more likely to prefer red wine to white wine.

People who prefer beer to wine are 50% more likely to prefer white wine to red wine.

Finally, some results are just bizarre. For example, comparing one’s choice of Star Trek character with one’s preferred byte-order layout yields the following (χ² = 4.6, “significant”):

People who prefer big endian to little endian are 6.0 times more likely to prefer Tribbles to Klingons.

People who prefer little endian to big endian are 6.0 times more likely to prefer Klingons to Tribbles.

As for the last, PCs are little endian and MACs are big endian, so perhaps this is saying that MAC owners prefer warm and fuzzy things (tribbles), while the PC owners are stuck with the cold pricklies (Klingons)!.