Friday, January 26, 2007

Dull Reading

Book meme that has been going around (and the first meme on this blog).

Grab the closest book
Turn to page 123
Go down 5 sentences.
Type out the next 3.

I usually think the outcome of these things are interesting, but not is this case.

"(For instance, notice that the curves in Figures 4.2-4.5 look identical.) But normal curves with different values of mu and sigma will not look identical if they are all plotted to the same scale, as illustrated by Figure 4.7. The location of the normal curve along the y-axis is governed by mu since the curve is centered a y = mu; the width of the curve is governed by sigma."

My only defense is that I am preparing a biostatistics lecture.

Hope you are able to read something more interesting this weekend.

2 comments:

Sparkling Squirrel said...

For this gene, allele A causes a certain carbohydrate molecule called type A to appear on the surface of the red blood cells . . and so forth.
Just wanted to let you know that you aren't the only dork reading text's on Friday afternoon

fillyjonk said...

Well, I think mine's a bit more fun:

"Various factors contributed to their evolutionary history on the Mascarene Islands, one of which was crucial: absence of humanity. Each of those three volcanic nubs was spared the presence of Homo sapiens until just a few hundred years ago. By some quirk of chance, (probably related to distance and to the prevailing currents of water and wind), no ocean-voyaging humans had arrived there during earlier milennia."

Song of the Dodo, David Quammen.