New Guitar!

You've won this eBay item: Left Handed Custom Jazz Bass (140223264158)



Wooooooop! :D Although, to be honest, I wasn't really expecting to lose the bid. I don't really think that the online market for fretless left handed custom jazz basses is exactly booming. ^{[citation needed]}.

..damn my ingrained Wikipedian habits. Well, here goes:

0.25% of people
I'm starting with a US figure as most eBay users are...American. Population of 300,000,000 ^[1], guitarists in the US: 750,000. ^[2]

0.025% of people
Approximately 10% of people worldwide are left-handed. ^[3]

0.0025% of people
Approximately 10% of those lefties that play guitar, play left-handed guitars. ^[4]

0.00225% of people
Whilst I don't have a reliable figure, I also know that a not insignificant percentage of left-handed guitar players merely buy right-handed guitars, and flip the string around. Examples include Jimi Hendrix and Paul McCartney. ^[5] I'm going to use 90% as a generous figure for left-handed people who play left-handed guitars.

0.0022500..01% of people
I'm presuming that few if any right-handed people play left-handed guitar, but I suppose we should accept it's a possibility, and some of these musical types are quite eccentric. No reference here, so disregard if you wish.

0.0000832500..01% of people
3.7% (20 of 539) of bass guitars on eBay today are fretless. ^[6]



0.0000099900..01% of people
12% of guitars on eBay are basses. See above.

0.000000199800.01% of people
No-one likes jazz, at all. I'm using 2% as my figure for simplicity of mathematics, and because I have another definite source for this. When I stood up at a meeting of the Aston Live Music Society in my second week of University, and asked if anyone else in the room wanted to play jazz, 98 other heads turned to avoid me and look into their drinks (one person put their hand up).

46 people
eBay has 233 million registered users ^[7]. Multiply that by my percentage and we end up with 46 people. That's 45 other people who might want to buy this guitar too, and I was fairly confident none of them would be looking for a new bass guitar today. I was right.

--

Anyhow, I digress. I have a gorgeous new guitar! More about that when it arrives.

If you got this far in the post, by the way, I recommend reading GeekSpeak: Why Life + Mathematics = Happiness, you'll love it.