CiF belief bingo

Andrew Brown has created CommentIsFree-Belief bingo. This is an important achievement, as it will permit a suitably gifted programmer to create an ELIZA-style comment-bot. Will we be able to distinguish between the remarkably facile comments produced by - allegedly - real live CiFers, and an automated alternative?

This will certainly prove something, unless it proves something else.

Another Anscombe

Something completely different

When I read the phrase Anscombe's quartets, I thought of the mighty GEM herself, but this is brilliant:  4 datasets with the same x,y mean and variance, the same regression line and the same correlation coefficient, but with completely different properties that are obvious as soon as you graph them. Suitably modified, this would make a lovely introduction to practical work for 1st year undergraduates: if nothing else, it might get them away from bunging the data into excel and plotting a regression line without graphing them first. Hmmmm.

[via Ben's miniblog]