Thursday, August 04, 2011
Meaningful dream?
Recording this morning's dream before it goes away. Seems to be one of those dreams that has an asterisk on it, telling me that I'm supposed to listen ... but damned if I can see why.
Dream was set at Penn State where I was a research tech in acoustics. Some visiting professor was touring our lab. He recognized me and pompously boomed, "Well, I see we have a pioneer in our midst."
In real life I was a very minor pioneer in a couple of areas: graphical waveform editing software, and cheap AAC. A few people recognized my role in the former, while the latter disappeared into the mists of history. I'm more proud of the latter.
But no, this visiting prof seemed to think I was a pioneer in Chi-Squared statistical methods. Obviously mistaken identity, since I hate statistics, rarely use anything beyond mean and median, and couldn't write a Chi-Squared formula if you held a gun to my head. (Using stats is a good way to create false connections and miss real connections, which is of course the exact job of every Scientist and Expert.)
I suppose the dream evolved from some comments I've made lately at WUWT regarding the need to analyze temperature patterns with wave methods like LPC rather than the more typical stat methods. Those comments are fully in character: pro-wave, anti-stats. But why the backwards character in the dream? Why does Chi-Squared appear at all, since I haven't even read the phrase in many years?
Dream was set at Penn State where I was a research tech in acoustics. Some visiting professor was touring our lab. He recognized me and pompously boomed, "Well, I see we have a pioneer in our midst."
In real life I was a very minor pioneer in a couple of areas: graphical waveform editing software, and cheap AAC. A few people recognized my role in the former, while the latter disappeared into the mists of history. I'm more proud of the latter.
But no, this visiting prof seemed to think I was a pioneer in Chi-Squared statistical methods. Obviously mistaken identity, since I hate statistics, rarely use anything beyond mean and median, and couldn't write a Chi-Squared formula if you held a gun to my head. (Using stats is a good way to create false connections and miss real connections, which is of course the exact job of every Scientist and Expert.)
I suppose the dream evolved from some comments I've made lately at WUWT regarding the need to analyze temperature patterns with wave methods like LPC rather than the more typical stat methods. Those comments are fully in character: pro-wave, anti-stats. But why the backwards character in the dream? Why does Chi-Squared appear at all, since I haven't even read the phrase in many years?
Labels: Blinded by Stats
¶ 3:42 AM
