People seem to spend an awful lot of their lives looking for stuff. For the most part, you might say people are looking for love, power or distraction. I, on the other hand, perhaps deciding that the first two items on this list will forever elude me1 ...... actually, fuck ....... hang on. If I'm going to include such a big, pervasive category as 'distraction' I may as well forget the other two, hey? More importantly, the completion of the sentence "I, on the other hand,..." becomes stupid and banal because whatever the fuck follows is almost certainly a member of the "distraction" category2 and hence my poignant little opening just collapses under its own weight. Ah, Shit. Oh, well, so accepting that the last few moments spent reading this post represent time wasted you'll never get back (sorry), let's just proceed with more of the let-down and say that much of my free time in the last week has been spent in a search for coffee.
Now that, I'm sure you're thinking, is a pretty stupid thing to spend too much time looking for. They sell the stuff in every supermarket in the country, it's one of the most widely consumed beverages on the planet and it's difficult to be placed at random in any moderately inhabited locale in the country without being within a few hundred metres of some cafe or eaterie claiming to be able to sell you an espresso. The problem is, dear reader, that when it comes to the set of cafes and eateries within walking distance of my current place of work these claims are lies!!!! Ask for a long black3 at any such establishment near me and what you get is this brackish liquid that smells vaguely like coffee but tastes like really bad tea - and frankly if black coffee doesn't induce a slight pain behind my left eye, well I'd say the vendor has failed in their contract with me, the consumer. And I mean it's not as though espresso machines are cheap, so how hard can it be to hire one fucking person who knows how to use the thing? Hmm? I mean I could bloody well do it if they'd just see fit to set up a coin-operated do-it-yourself machine..... actually, that's a really good idea..... I'll squirrel that away along with my plans to manufacture party tooter thingies4 that sound like an elephant and have an extension that looks like an elephant's trunk......... O.K. so, maybe this isn't the wisest thing to be worried about at present what with global warming and an imminent federal election and all, but I think we've all established by now that I'm a terribly petty person who gets rather worked up over small things. That, or possibly this is a lie and I just do it for effect. Who can say?
Anyways, on the statistics half of things (what I seem to be spending most of my non-free time on at the moment....). Does it strike anyone else as terribly odd that statistics is generally so very boring? I mean, take probability theory to start with. I mean, this is basically measure theory and analysis, right? Nothing wrong with those, and in any case I've gone and done courses in probability theory and I've found it to be a perfectly interesting subject. So now consider the idea of applying probability theory to the independent world around you. This is, philosophically, really rather interesting too. This is kind of foundational meta-science type stuff in the same way as set theory and logic can be thought of as meta-mathematics. And yet, when you move on to the class of stuff taken as falling under the umbrella category of 'statistics' which is, essentially, just applied probability theory, well, it all seems so dull and I'm buggered if I can work out why this should be so.
1go on, cue the violins you bastards
2And, in point of fact, it will be
3 I've never been game to ask for a short one.
4 You know the ones I'm talking about. You blow on them and get a 'toot' sound, while pneumatically extending this colourful paper thing.
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8 comments:
Nice post. I don't like coffee and I find statistics suicide inducing.
Oh, god. I, too, have worked in the sort of squalid hellhole where 'long black' means 'International Roast and urine', and 'soy cappuccino' means 'call the terrorist hotline, we have a live one'. It is bleak and dismal and I have every sympathy for you. In the meantime, buy a small plunger and bring your own ground coffee to work. Good luck.
I dunno. I like a lot of statistics, even if I don't really have a deep understanding of it.
And even if I never dreamed of doing a STAT course at uni. What boredom that would have been.
I now feel I have a better understanding of what it is like to be Fitz. Thank you Fitz. As for loathing statistics, is the real problem that you don't care at all for the data you are analysing?
Geoff. Maybe.... actually I think it's more along the lines of the fact that the whole thing takes a recipe-book approach. This is a model. We use it. Smarter heads than yours developed this stuff and so you should use it, too. We never EVER think about why.
And helena: the really wierd thing is that they have an espresso machine.... you order and the machine makes all the requisite noises and such-like... steam rises appropriately.... then you get your international roast and urine. I suspect they just have a kettle behind there..... anyway, the story actually does have a happy ending (in that I discovered a coffee machine at work on friday - cue Handel's messiah) I just feel that happy endings have no proper place in my blog posts.
Dave: STAT 2003 and STAT 3004 are both perfectly respectable courses I did. All probability theory and stochastic proccesses. Nothing wrong with them at all. I suspect the real problem with statistics is that it's commercially useful and hence focus can tend to be on the commercially useful stuff - which in any field of mathematics tends not to be the interesting stuff (I'm looking at YOU operations research).
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