Dear John, I sympathise...
> I flunked statistics in college. I never got the hang of statistics until I was fingered to give a lecture course on the subject and I have never looked back! In dialling, I use statistics for error analysis and also when trying to do things which are impossible! Rotating a horizontal dial for Summer Time illustrates the kind of thing. You can use a best-fit approach to arrange the hour-lines so they approximately work in both states. Hey, I am still on the topic! I am now in the middle of planning a talk at the April BSS Conference where I propose to describe a quite different kind of impossible sundial! Come along! No statistical ability needed :-) Your analysis of the Equation of Time is not quite as bad as some readers might think... Best case: off by 0 minutes Worst case: off by 16 minutes Average: 8 minutes. The result, 8, is known as the Mid-Range value and is related to the Mean, Median and the rest. The mid-range value is generally regarded as a bad choice because it is governed by two "outliers", the extremes of 0 and 16. With random numbers such use of outliers is indeed bad but with the Equation of Time we are not using random numbers and the result is not too far from more respectable values! In the opening lecture of my course I always issue a warning: "Never accept an invitation to play a betting game with me!" Be careful! All the best Frank --------------------------------------------------- https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/sundial
