Guess how many sweets are in the jar, or better yet, guess how much the sweets inside the jar weigh. Not including the jar itself but including all the sweets you can’t actually see in the photo….

I’ll give you a little help, you see that green one near the top left? Well the distance from the highest tip of that sweet to the lowest tip of the red stripy one down the bottom is… let’s say 25cm. NOW tell me how much the contents of the jar weigh.

What? You mean you can’t work it out?

No, I couldn’t either, neither can my mathematically gifted husband. Although he does argue that he is familiar with these kinds of sweet jars and would therefore be able to estimate that the sweets weigh 1kg. But he is missing my point a bit.

From looking at this picture alone, with one arbitrary measurement and without being able to see maybe 80% of the sweets in the jar, there is absolutely no way that with this information alone anyone would be able to estimate with any degree of accuracy how much the sweets weigh. My husband is right though, using his life experience, he can guess the weight fairly accurately. But we do know with some degree of certainty that these exact sweets were weighed before putting them in the jar prior to sale. The same cannot be said of a baby in the womb. Continue reading →