Posted on 07/20/2010 1:39:51 PM PDT by decimon
I like an honest person. Hat's off to ya.
I payed that guy at 7-11 to card you for the liquor.
If the electrons are like a ‘shell’ around the atoms and ions, wouldn’t they be like the ‘shells’ that are the outer layers of our atmosphere?
Or like the Van Allen radiation belt?
*kof*
*kof*
(jeeze)
*kof*
Once in my life have I been carded. And only because I asked him...since I was 14...
U jest, right?
About what?
So... did he buy the liquor for you?
All of the above? (She asks, coyly...)
*snark*
Non, mon brer! Moi was/is capable of buying the liquor for moi...In those days, I could FAKE it! And I did!
What?
Isn’t it past your bedtime?
'Moi' still didn't answer whether he threw her out or not.
If you were 14 and he carded you, did he let you buy (i.e. he bought it), or did he throw you out?
And quit answering a question with a question.
If we both do it, we could end up in an infinite loop.
Know what I mean?
Who have you been talking to, she asks.
And why is my bedtime a subject to be discussed?
Jeeze.
No one EVER threw me out of anyplace that liked my cute face and my big boobs. ;o]
Life sucks. No one has carded me in FOREVER! My boobs were big enough at 14 that no one qestioned me for anything; I had to ask a bartender in Wyoming (Of all places) to PLEASE card me so I could show my ID.
Since 90% confidence isn’t enough, the 10% confidence that it isn’t so will have to do, eh? ;’)
The laymen usually misunderstand how little “90%” is as a confidence level - and some traders with fear masterfully abuse this ignorance. 90% vs 10% is not that “qualitatively” far from 50% vs 50% - and one can transform one to the other by a “slight” pressure in the methodology and the formulae. If you want to be scientifically confident about a conclusion, you should really demand 99.9% or more. And it’s actually not that hard to obtain such stronger evidence assuming that your hypothesis is actually correct and the “signal” exists.
http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/03/defending-statistical-methods.html
In particular, discoveries of new particles by colliders do require 5 sigma. No one would have claimed a discovery of a top quark at 3 sigma - which would only be viewed as a suggestive yet vague hint.
Once again, this increase is needed because people often cook their results to make “discovery claims” that are bogus: it’s easy to “improve” the tests. If you try 10 variations of the same test, one of them will show a (fake) effect at a 90% confidence level: that’s what the 90% confidence level means, by definition. Unfortunately, many researchers are approaching the things in this way.
With a 5-sigma discovery, such cheating becomes virtually impossible because you would need a million of variations of your paper - and only one of them would show a fake positive. On the other hand, it’s not “infinitely more difficult” to get 5-sigma results relatively to 3-sigma results. Because the relative errors go like “1/sqrt(N)” where N is the number of events (whose average you’re calculating, in a way), you only need to increase the number of events by a factor of “(5/3)^2 = 2.7778” to go from 3 sigma to 5 sigma.
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