The Lair

It’s been said (well, if it hasn’t, I just said it) that if one stares at a series of random numbers – or events or anything, really; an apparent pattern emerges. Or to put it another way, given a lack of rules for discerning a pattern, even completely random numbers appear to have some embedded meaning. Given one or more of adequate study, sufficient hallucinogens and/or lack of sleep.

And so it is. I’ve been working on a series of experiments which produce a set of weird numbers. Those numbers have been crunched by Excel (that stalwart of wannabe statisticians and digit munchers everywhere) and the result was… no patterns or predictions whatsoever.

Undeterred by this minor setback, I graphed, sliced, diced, minced, tweaked, normalized and swore. And in a haze of sleeplessness, a pattern emerged. A veritable Eureka moment, but sans towels (or the lack thereof), bathtub and other embarassing incidents including public nudity.

And I shamelessly stole the title and the punchline for this post from PhD Comics (actual comic is here). Just substitute years for months and you pretty much describe my situation.