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Talk:Statistics/Basic: Difference between revisions
→Wrong emphasis in 'Extra'?: Apologies where due.
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:::: The distribution comes up quite often when working with quantities that follow a power law (i.e., where they are distributed more evenly in log space) which is actually quite often. In any case, the warning about such things is relevant because someone ''will'' copy the code on this page and use it unwisely; there are whole legions of fools who want to program by cut-n-paste only and without any thought for side conditions, but even so it is still something that we should note for our own consciences. Write robust code for extra credit! –[[User:Dkf|Donal Fellows]] 18:03, 2 July 2011 (UTC)
::::: I don't mean to argue, but what kind of values are you measuring that crosses 16 orders of magnitude? AFAIK the most precise measurement in physics to date is only at 10^-13 relative scale. --[[User:Ledrug|Ledrug]] 18:24, 2 July 2011 (UTC)
Hi Ledrug, I initially read the extra credit task as requiring the formula for calculating the standard deviation that avoids going once through the numbers to calculate the mean then going through the numbers a second time to work out the differences from the mean, and so on. Because that formula was ommited, it seemed like an attempt to make that part of the task about finding that formula as well as implementing it. If that was not your intent, and no-one else saw it that way then I apologise. --[[User:Paddy3118|Paddy3118]] 20:39, 2 July 2011 (UTC)
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