Priceless, your article, it turns out. Thanks for linking.
Quote:
|
Sending enough hits to test a sponsor There's a concept in statistics called standard deviation. The idea is that 68% of the time a quantity will be within one standard deviation of the average. 95% of the time one expects to find the quantity within two standard deviations of the average. When a scientist measures some quantity they quote it with an error measurement which is one standard deviation. No measurement is certain. I will just refer to the standard deviation as the error, but you will know that technically I mean the standard deviation. I've also left a few technical details out such as how confident we are in our measurements because well, I'm only going to take this so far.
|
Quote:
|
In the Poisson Distribution the error is simply the square root of the average.
|
I always thought standard deviation is somehow related to the statistical variance, for whatever reason. But I guess we might as well re-christen variance and call it the average. Altho I always thought it's a mean not an average. But I guess we could re-christen means to be averages too.
Bloody hell I haven't laughed this much in months.
68%.