Monday, February 06, 2006

A little math never killed anyone...yet

In lab meeting this morning, our department head mentioned an upcoming seminar sponsored by the biostatisics department that he thought we might be interested. He said "Now, I know it will be a little math-heavy" (also known as mathy). "It might be a little painful, but as far as I'm aware no one has ever died from math."

I say: No one has ever died from math... YET. I'm sure there's still a chance, as I've felt like I was nearly dead after certain very mathy lectures. I'm sure that one more incomprehensible slide about MCMC would have done the trick. I was just LUCKY to escape with my life. But next time, I might not be so lucky, so I think I'll skip it. Just to be safe.

2 comments:

Karl Broman said...

Of course I must respond. It's true that statisticians can be extremely boring, but even the most mathy of talks can be made quite entertaining, and statisticians certainly don't have a monopoly on boring and completely unintelligible talks.

Also, I've come to understand that coffee and cookies are an effective treatment, or at least a useful prophylaxis, for an overdose of math.

I tried to identify the speaker of the talk that you'll be skipping. It'd be nice to see an abstract, so that I could give you a precise estimate of the lethality of this particular dose of mathiness.

Lisa said...

Oh come on. It was your lecture that almost killed me, after all.

Kidding!!

It was this guy speaking today.
We don't get enough cookies/coffee here, or any really. The gov't doesn't like to spend money on such frivolity, which is really too bad. We don't get to have happy hours either, also too bad.