Students
My best friend is a stat professor at a fairly prestigious American university. He told me this story and I don’t doubt a word that comes out of the man’s mouth. Apparently a few years back something caught his attention in one of his larger lectures. He noticed that most students sat in the same seats every day, but that a few seemed to move around quite a bit. Being the math-head that he is, he decided to start charting where the students sat each day.
After a month or so he had a solid block of data. Every once in awhile when he was bored in his office he’d give it a going over, cross-referencing the choice of seats by age, gender, and other defining features. It was after the second month of class that pattern emerged.
By the end of the semester he was spending a lot of his time pouring over the data in his office. He’d even missed a few other classes here and there to work on the problem. He didn’t explain to me exactly how he arrived at his final discovery, but at the end of the semester, after extrapolating the data vis-a-vis simple morse code he found a message in the seating pattern.
His students were constantly and consistently spelling “HELP US.”
Originally uploaded on /x/ in 2007
| Comments • 0 |
Loading comments...
|
