odditycollector

jmatonak asked, ( Can every even integer greater than two be written as the sum of exactly two prome numbers? )

 
daegaer asked for ( Aziraphale, Antiques Road Show. )
 

glossing asked for ( Bart Allen, oral fixations. )
 

poisonivory asked for ( Kara, family, SHAMELESSLY shmoopy. )
 

brown_betty gave me this link, and in doing so totally made my evening.

[Poll #858507]

 
A couple of years ago I took a course on the use of statistics in psychology.* The following paragraph has stuck with me longer and *sharper* than almost anything I've read since.

 
      Wainer (1999) tells a story from World War II that reminds us of the sometimes perverse aspects of selection bias. He describes an aircraft analyst who was trying to determine where to place extra armor on an aircraft based on the pattern of bullet holes in the returning planes. His decision was to put the extra armor in the places that were free of bullet holes on the returning aircraft that he analyzed. His reasoning was that the planes had probably been pretty uniformly hit with bullets. Where he found the bullet holes on the returning aircraft told him that, in those places, the plane could be hit and still return.

- Stanovich; How to Think Straight About Psychology (7)

 
When I think of it currently, I'm almost certain that tangled in this idea is a thick and twisty piece of meta on alternate universes. DCU, because that's where I am, and the universes that exist beside it in canon and in fandom. The ones we read about, the ones we write. The ones we don't.

Or possibly just an essay on Tim Drake.

 

*A course usually taken by Arts students who imagine they are on track to cutting up the brains of mice and such. I took it because I liked statistics and thought psychology was rather neat as an idea. Why *wouldn't* the two go great together!

The fact that my course picking logic has not really improved since then is a lot of the reason I don't have a pretty piece of paper yet.

( I got one wrong! How embarrassing. )

ETA: Okay, after some guess and checking, I find I missed on the origins of the Fibonacci sequence. But that's not math. That's *history*.

Today is Earth Day, so this week's thing worthy of glee shall be thematically appropriate (as well as still not requiring a lengthy writeup, but I am sure that is simply coincidence).

When I was much younger, I was given a stuffed globe as a present, and it is still absolutely awesome.

I spent many happy hours staring at the countries, coloured in purple, green, yellow, and red. While I somehow managed to pick up *no geography whatsoever*, I did come to some basic conclusions about planar graphs long before we broached the subject in class.

(Graph theory, by the way, is also a thing that is awesome.)

The globes are made by a company called Hugg-A-Planet, as I found out by dint of looking at the tag. They've got other stuffed planets as well; however, I must warn you that the picture they have up for *my* Earth is slightly frightening. I could be wrong, but I'm fairly sure human children aren't meant to have solid black eyes. (Hugg-a-planet! Perfect for the budding galactic dominator. Give your pod-spawn an early taste of planetary possession! Doesn't break like a real planet!)

Also, for people who *really* love America. The family friendly version, at least.