The Road / Cormac McCarthy

Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that.
You forget some things, don't you?
Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.
Cormac McCarthy, The Road
"To live a creative life we must lose our fear of being wrong." Joseph Chilton Pearce

"If you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed,
except by answering: Because it was he, because it was I."
Michel de Montaigne, "Of Friendship"

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

For Mr. Less

The buzzword at General Electric these days is "Six Sigma," meaning that its goal is to make product defects so rare that in statistical terms they are more than six standard deviations away from being a matter of chance--almost a one-in-a-million occurrence. 
--Atul Gawande, "Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science"

I was reading this book on Gawande's experience as a general surgeon and suddenly thought of Mr. Less at the words "sigma" and "standard deviations." If I had his email address, I would have sent it right away. I remember the joke about CLT. Central Limit Theorem. Also the airport at Charlotte, Virginia--where he is now. 
Posted by at
Labels: ,

No comments:

Post a Comment