Which proves my point that our educational system simply MUST teach kids to think independently.
I once read an article that contained a statistical analysis utilizing the Poisson Distribution. I could immediately see how this article could help me simplify my job, so I wrote a spreadsheet program that calculated the essential elements of the concepts in a format that I could use.
I showed my spreadsheet and the calculating formulas to my superior. He said, "You must be really good at calculus."
"Calculus?" I said. "I always thought calculus was too hard, so I never took a course in it."
My teachers taught me how to think for myself, and that's all I did.
(If anybody cares, the Poisson Distribution is a probability curve with a very long tail. For example, there is a high probability that there are one, two, three, or a few liberals posting on the SI President George W. Bush thread at any one time, but there is really no upper limit. If you plotted the distribution on a curve, it would have a hump near the zero point on the axis, with a long tail extending all the way out to, theoretically, infinity.)
I know, BORING! Say no more. |
