[RACCies/Admin] States of the RACCies address
Martin Phipps
martinphipps2 at yahoo.com
Mon Aug 27 11:29:38 PDT 2007
On Aug 27, 2:49 pm, "Saxon Brenton" <saxonbren... at hotmail.com> wrote:
> I am not only inexcusably lazy, but I am also a ravening nitwit.
>
> Yes I am. Don't argue with me.
>
> You may have noticed how late the RACCies are. For a very long time the
> effort of tabulating the results and cross checking them daunted me, and so
> I put them off. Then it occurred to me:
>
> The first year of my tenure I did them the HARD WAY: typing up a matrix and
> filling them out by hand (three times so that any differences would
> highlight flaws in my adding up).
>
> But then I thought: `Hold up. Last year I didn't do them by hand. I just
> typed them into one of them thar newfangled spreadsheets, which - wonder of
> wonders - are particularly noteworthy for doing large tallies of numbers
> WITHOUT GETTING THE ADDITION WRONG.'
>
> < sounds of crickets chirping as the rest of RACC stares in horror at the
> awesome extent of Saxon's ravening nitwit-ness >
>
> So. After about five hours of work, the tallies for both the RACCies and
> the RACCies Hall Of Fame have been completed. Not gonna do a full write-up
> of the awards ceremony, because I just want to get this over with. Expect
> the results to be posted within the next day.
Then there's me.
"Oh my. You have a lot of data from that experiment. Who's going to
tabulate the data, hmm? Tell you what: just give me the data and I'll
tabulate it for you and save you the trouble and then you can just
comment on it. Don't worry. I like tabulating data."
I'm weird that way. I don't like typing data into a computer and
having the computer tell me what the result is. @#$% spread sheets.
@#$% Mathematica. On second thought, I should lovingly spoon
Mathematica because I wouldn't want to do a numerical integral by
hand. That would be nasty. But adding things up is something I like
doing on my own.
My guess is that this is Saxon's subtle way of telling us he doesn't
want to do the RACCies for a fourth year. Okay. We get it. :)
Martin
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