When I was growing, I always considered our school "average," by which I meant unremarkable, middle of the road. We weren't one of the outstanding schools that always took home trophies in sports and awards in academics, but neither were we one of the schools perpetually teetering on the edge of disaster.
And then everything changed, when we got swept up in the Expulsions and it was off to Shepardsport with us. That was when I learned the problems with the loose, colloquial way we use words like "average." That word has a technical meaning in statistics, and given how life up here on the Moon is so heavily dependent upon keeping track of lots of data on various life-support metrics, we needed to know whether we were talking about the mean, the median, or the mode, and how any of them might be weighted.
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Date: 2025-04-27 06:40 pm (UTC)And then everything changed, when we got swept up in the Expulsions and it was off to Shepardsport with us. That was when I learned the problems with the loose, colloquial way we use words like "average." That word has a technical meaning in statistics, and given how life up here on the Moon is so heavily dependent upon keeping track of lots of data on various life-support metrics, we needed to know whether we were talking about the mean, the median, or the mode, and how any of them might be weighted.