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Nominal, Ordinal, Interval, Ratio, Explained With My Food Delivery Orders
Scales Of Measurement, A Beginner’s Guide
The average of Indian food and Thai food is Italian food.
I didn't make that up for a laugh. Store four cuisines in a spreadsheet as numbers, ask a computer for the average of two of them, and that's the answer you get. The same computer will tell you my average postcode is 1215.6. It'll also happily agree that 20°C is twice as warm as 10°C. No warning, no red underline. Just a confident number with a decimal point.
None of that is a bug. Python did exactly what it was told. The trouble is that numbers come in four different kinds, and only the person holding them knows which kind they are. Mix them up in a class assignment and you lose a few marks. Mix them up in a science journal and the paper gets pulled, which really happened, and I'll tell you that story at the end.
The average nobody asked for
I noticed this with my own food orders. Most delivery apps let you download your history, so I grabbed ten orders and loaded them into pandas, which is Python's spreadsheet library. Each order has a postcode, a cuisine and a spice level (1, 2 or 3). It also has the stars I gave, the food's…
