Bell Curve & Bell Jar

It's not often that statistics and poetry meet. (Mostly it's hard to find a rhyme for "standard deviation." Slandered correlation? Philandered fornication?) But it does sometimes happen...

Meditation on Statistical Method

J.V. Cunningham

Plato, despair!
We prove by norms
How numbers bear
Empiric forms,


How random wrong
Will average right
If time be long
And error slight,


But in our hearts
Hyperbole
Curves and departs
To infinity.


Error is boundless.
Nor hope nor doubt,
Though both be groundless,
Will average out.