A while back I was out with a couple of friends to see Jess and Zeb.  They’re a swell couple of kids.  Go check out their website, and go see them at one of their venues if you get the chance.  And no, despite their on-stage chemistry they are not dating.  At least, that’s what they say.

     Anyway, we were at Keegan’s Irish Pub (Irish pubs are a thing with us, esp. if they show rugby games), and visiting between sets.

     I’d missed dinner, and I’d had a few strong drinks, as I am wont to do now that I have cut my unhealthy habits down to alcohol, coffee and endorphins.  Oh, and the occasional bout of passive-aggressive whining…but that’s cultural, so it’s OK.

     As I was saying, I’d had a couple of strong drinks, so when one of the women, lets call her Jenny, made some obsessive comment about the meaning of some isolated action or statement made by some guy I was not exactly in a position to be brain-to-mouth-filter girl.

     I said something like “Don’t you read my blog?  Anomalous Data?  Hello?   Know what it means?  It means…one data point all by itself…no meaning.  You can’t draw conclusions from it.  You can’t predict future behavior with it.  You can’t correlate it to anything.  It just exists with no context and therefore no meaning.”

     Blank stares.  Maybe a hint of panic…liberally salted with confusion.  Either that, or it was the look of rats who have just realized they are about to the trapped in a bombastic and drunken lecture about elementary statistical analysis.  Hard to say.

     I grabbed for a lifeline, and came up with a handful of paper napkin and a pen.  Good enough.

     “Look”, I said, closing one eye and making a precise stab at the napkin with the pen, “One point, or one event, if you will.  Means nothing.”  (note to self using the phrase “if you will” when slurring drunk sounds even more pretentious and than it does when you’re stone sober).

     I make another careful stab at the napkin, and then draw a line between somewhere fairly close to the first point to somewhere understandably divergent from the second point.  It’s meant to go from one to the other, and I think they see that.

     “Two points.  There’s a line.”  I declare triumphantly.  They give me the encouraging looks one usually reserves for a needy seven-year old who expects validation for the revelation; “Look!  I can hop on one foot!”

     “Still doesn’t mean anything.  You can’t predict with any certainty where the third point will be.”  I look into their expectant faces, and wait for the light to dawn.  “You still don’t know where it’s going.  You need more information.”  They nod in agreement.

     “OK.”  Third stab at the napkin…continuing (sort of) on the same line…”Now, you’ve got three points along the same line.  You can call it a trend.  There’s no guarantee that the next point will fall on this line, but it is reasonable to expect that, all other things being equal, that it will.  NOW it means something.”

     “So you think it’s a fluke?”  Jenny asks.

     “No way to know ”.  I shrug, accepting my last-call drink from our waitress, “Until you get more information.  You need at least three points to predict a trend.  You need three points to triangulate location, and you need three points to plot a course.  One piece of information isn’t enough to do anything with.”

     “You don’t say anything about that in your blog.”

     “Oh.  I don’t?  Well, I’d better fix that then.”

Disclaimer:  this entry is a fictionalized account of the evening as reconstructed from a blurry memory, and from oral accounts of people who were there…with liberal artistic license to make me look like a much more entertaining drunk than I actually am.  Your Mileage May Vary.

Also, to make Jenny look not nearly as smart as she really is, because damnit, she's young and cute and really smart...which is just annoying so she deserves it.