[Book] Measurement and the Law of Errors

Ancient Experiment: Science or Art
In the old time, scientists perform experiment, and make the best intuitive guess of what the result should be. And, if they were to repeat the experiment, they could get totally different results. They just lacked a standard for measurement.
In other words, they use feeling rather than scientific method. Is this science? Or, is it art? “Any variation within a margin of error should be ignored.”

The Law of Errors: The Bell Curve
Given a set of observations, Pascal tells us how expected value of the observations can be computed. But the expectation is just what you expect, not the real observations. The real one could deviate from the expectation. Now, the question is “by how much the observations deviate from the expectation?”

Decades of study have shown that the deviation pattern follows what mathematicians call the normal distribution, often referred to as the Bell Curve due to its shape. The Bell Curve is characterized by two parameters: Expectation (what to expect of the observation) and Standard deviation (How much the observations deviate from the expectation, i.e., how reliable the expectation is).

So What?
Modern scienticfic measurement is not based on feeling. It iterates the same experiment for several times, and finds a valid representation. In most cases, expectation is a valid representation. And, we can tell how reliable the expectation is by looking at the standard deviation.


Source: The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow, Chapter 7 [Read the Book Review] [Read the Previous Part] [Read the Next Part].
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Book or Audiobooks?

Personally, I prefer audiobooks. It's fun, and I can listen when I'm doing something else. It also makes other activities (e.g., jogging) a lot more fun. For more detail about audiobooks, please read [this post].

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About the summary: It takes time to finish up a book. And, when you do, sometimes, you want to review what you learn from the book. If you do not make notes as you read, you might have to go through the book once again. This can be time-consuming when you are dealing with a book. But you can still flip through the book and locate what you are looking for

However, when the material is an audiobook, it is extremely hard to locate a specific part of content. Most likely you will have to listen to the entire audiobook once again.

This book summary will help solve the pain of having to go through the book all over again.

I am leaving out the details of the books. Most books have interesting examples and case studies, not included here. Reading the original book would be much more entertaining and enlightening. If you like the summary, you may want to get the original from the source below.