my silly brain

So, I was starting in with two-sample t tests in class today, and I was describing how you have to deal with the variances in order to do the "traditional" form of the test. (Some people now seem to be advocating just always using Welch's approximate t or a test very much like it, where you don't use a pooled variance, but the degrees of freedom calculation, if you're doing hand calculations, are whaaaarrrgarrrble for that....)

Anyway, what you do for the traditional test is calculate a pooled variance, known as s_p²    

And as I wrote it on the board, because there's always that one person who needs to know explicitly what every abbreviation is, I just automatically said, "And the 'p' stands for 'pooled.'"

And then I had to stop. I snorted quietly to myself, I don't think any of the students noticed, because I just saw what I (inadvertently) did there - "And the p stands for pool"

And then I had a mental picture of Prof. Harold Hill trying to teach biostatistics. I wanted to laugh but I couldn't, really, and I figured that was one of those things that wasn't a particularly profitable rabbit hole to go down (and I don't know how many of the class would have seen "The Music Man"). But I think him teaching biostats would be kind of like this:



First, because I think Tom Lehrer and Robert Preston sounded a little alike, at least in terms of singing voice. But mainly because I think some aspects of New Math were about as trusty as "The Think System."