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Anyone who's been paying attention to the nerdier ends of the internet over the past few years might be familiar with the concept of "the long tail." For those who haven't, here's a brief rundown: computer nerds tell us that, for almost anything quantifiable (like the number of cars a family owns), a bunch of people will have a low number (many families have one or two cars), but as that quantity grows larger, the corresponding percentage of people will drop (few families have three cars, fewer still have four, and so on). The name comes from the graph used to show this, which looks like a long tail.