Linux and readline

Bill Campbell bill at celestial.com
Fri Jun 5 09:48:16 PDT 2009


On Fri, Jun 05, 2009, Kenneth Brody wrote:
...
>"On two occasions I have been asked,?'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the 
>machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' ? I am not able 
>rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such 
>a question."

You mean like the infamous ``hockey stick'' graph in the IPCC
``climate change'' report which would come out the same with any
sequence of random numbers :-).

I had a manager once who thought he had done something miraculous
when he found an equation that was an exact match to a set of
sonar range data.  I pointed out to him that one can always find
an exact polynomial of degree N-1 to N data points so his results
didn't really mean much.

GIGO

Bill
-- 
INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
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The meek shall inherit the Earth, the rest of us will go to the stars...
    -Dr. Isaac Asimov


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