If I fail in life and die...

...it will be because I was checking blogs when I was supposed to be finishing my stats final that I have to turn in in about an hour.

Yeah, take a wild guess how much I am luuuurving stats right now...

Life lesson

Event: I got 100% on my second stats midterm.

Life lesson: Jeremy is harder to convince of my stats knowledge than the TA who graded my test.

A Big Moment

It was during my stats class. The prof was talking about variance, and how we figure out how much variance is explained or accounted for by various factors, blah blah blah. And then he mentioned overlap (not the technical word) of explanations of variance. And then -

I got it.

And I raised my hand and said (hee hee!), "So if you want to explore just the questions that interest you, choose your own contrasts and deal with the overlap. But if you want to explain all the variance, choose an orthogonal set of contrasts and deal with the complex contrasts."

And the prof smiled and gave me a big thumbs up and went on with the lecture.

And I sat back in my seat with a huge satisfied grin on my face because - FINALLY! - something about some of the choices we might make about what statistical procedures to use when made sense to me.

Awesome. And by "awesome" I mean, "Mwahahahahahahahaaa!" :) :)

Why You Should Use Your Brain When You Read Statistics: A Case Study

So I got my electric bill over the weekend, and it was $23.83, down from $27 last month. (Woohoo! That's 3 Frosties!!) (It would have been 4 Frosties, but they raised the price on the 99 cent Frosty - now it's $1.19.) (Which totally defeats the purpose of the 99 cent Frosty, if you ask me.) And there was a little blurb on the bill saying that I could sign up for the "budget payment plan," which equalizes your payments over the whole year, based on the average billing amount, so that you can avoid spikes in the bill and plan your monthly budget more effectively, blah blah blah, and my monthly payment would be...$15.

Uh, now, I know I'm not a math major, but unless there have been MAJOR changes in the way numbers work since I last calculated a mean, $15 is not the average of $27 and $23.83. Even though I am not a math major, I do know that $15 < $23.83, so on the theory of, "gosh! wouldn't it be nice if $15 WAS the average of $27 and $23.83?!" (just THINK how many Frosties I could afford!!) I called the electric company to check up on it. And sure enough, they got that amount by averaging electricity costs in the apartment for the last 6 months...during which the apartment was unoccupied for several months. So yeah, $27 and $23.83 and a couple of $0's? They do average out to $15. And when they went back to check the time period during which the apartment was occupied, the average was $40. And I know that $23.83 < $40, so I'll just stick with paying my actual bill, thank you very much.

Hmph.