Hypothesis Testing

Perhaps the most useful aspect of statistics I will ever use--- too bad I have no idea how to do it. It's an embarrassing confession, that despite 2 weeks in class and a million examples on the whiteboard, I have no idea how to test whether a set of data is statistically significant. Normally I wouldn't worry about it--- if I can't do it, get someone who can do it to do it for me. Too bad that's considered cheating in an exam, though I prefer to think of it as being resourceful.

My exam is less than 24 hours away... and I'm sitting here looking over my notes, thinking, "I have no idea what the fuck I'm doing." Well... that's cool. I guess I'll just fail my exam miserably.

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Ever heard of this thing called "天书" (tian shu)? It's Chinese for heavenly scrolls- these heavenly scrolls are documents, which contain precious information on all worldly knowledge--- basically answers to every question ever asked. The key characteristic of tian shu? It's completely indecipherable.

"That's a pretty cool story," I hear you say, "but what does that have to do with hypothesis testing?"

Well you see, being the clever person I am, I had the foresight to obtain a copy of the solutions to the hypothesis testing problems in my textbook. That way, if I ever get stuck during revision, I could refer to these solutions. The one and only problem with these solutions, however, is that the handwriting looks like a bunch of squiggles. In essence, the maths solutions I have is "tian shu". Has the potential to be useful, yes. Containing all the answers I want, yes. Cannot be interpreted, yes.

So now I'm squinting at the solutions, and my eyes are more Asian than ever. 5 = 0.214? That doesn't make sense, that 5 must be an "s".

Perhaps I should be thankful that these are maths solutions and not a hand-written English essay. Statistics is a unit which is abundant in numbers... at least this isn't some other crazy maths where you use the letters of the alphabet more than you use actual numbers.

...Well, if I thought that way, I'd be an optimist, wouldn't I?

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That overwhelming sense of joy you feel, when your answers, though unlikely, completely matches that of the solutions. Yet the internal voice in my head says, "you admitted yourself that you couldn't read the solutions properly. Maybe you're just getting desperate, and you're hallucinating numbers which matches to what you've worked out yourself."

...Shut up brain, you're such a kill-joy.

If I ever get enough time, I'd like to study the development of internal voices in one's head, how that's related to consciousness--- and more importantly, how to silence that stupid voice.

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 One exercise down... a million more 2 go. The original intention was that I'd do 2 questions from every exercise, so that I'd at least have tried everything... except I can't just move on from an exercise when I try twice, and both my attempts are WRONG. It's rather baffling...

Oh well, the night is long. Though I should probably sleep before an exam...

....And my English oral... is tomorrow, isn't it? FML