More Weird "Averages"

By -
In a book called The Wild Woods Guide, the authors present a table of cloud types with some characteristic features. Stratus clouds are listed as having an average cloud height of "0 -- 450 meters." Well, first off, how can a cloud be zero meters in height (not zero meters from the ground -- its own height is the average here)? Wouldn't that be no cloud? Or when it looks perfectly clear, is the sky actually filled with zero height stratus clouds?

What's more, what kind of "averages" are they giving in the table? (They are ranges for all cloud types.) The mean, median, and mode all give you a single number, not a range. And this is not an isolated instance, I see these "averages" all the time, e.g.: "Joe Smith averaged between 15 and 30 home runs a year during his career."

Comments

  1. Margaret6:06 PM

    On average, I would assume that a cloud could be thinner than one meter but thicker than zero meters.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more