Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) | by Linux fortune |
A biologist, a statistician, a mathematician and a computer scientist are on a photo-safari in Africa. As they're driving along the savannah in their jeep, they stop and scout the horizon with their binoculars. The biologist: "Look! A herd of zebras! And there's a white zebra! Fantastic! We'll be famous!" The statistician: "Hey, calm down, it's not significant. We only know there's one white zebra." The mathematician: "Actually, we only know there exists a zebra, which is white on one side." The computer scientist : "Oh, no! A special case!" | |
A statistician, who refused to fly after reading of the alarmingly high probability that there will be a bomb on any given plane, realized that the probability of there being two bombs on any given flight is very low. Now, whenever he flies, he carries a bomb with him. | |
"...A strange enigma is man!" "Someone calls him a soul concealed in an animal," I suggested. "Winwood Reade is good upon the subject," said Holmes. "He remarked that, while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician." -- Sherlock Holmes, "The Sign of Four" |