Monday, June 14, 2010

Monday's Quote

I'm guessing most of you know the name of Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), creator of the immortal Sherlock Holmes (though it's debatable he'd recognize his creation n the recent film of that name). Anyway, here's something he wrote that is relevant to the art of detection, but not only in that area:

"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 be up to, but you can
say with precision what an average number
will be up to. Individuals, vary, but percentages
remain constant. So says the statistician."

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