So today’s topic immediately brought to mind this little joke, which I’m sure you’ve all seen if you’ve traversed the Tubes for more than ten minutes:

I know it’s not the same thing, but that’s what it reminded me of.

Anyway.

Today’s science blog has to do with the phenomenon called anomalous cancellation. Anomalous cancellations are arithmetic procedural errors with fractions that, despite being errors, will still result in a correct answer.

Examples from Wiki:

So it’s basically like looking at a problem and, as if you don’t know how to correctly solve it, trying to solve it intuitively based on the features of the numbers in the problem.

I  might just be imagining it (because I’m me and I’m a spaz), but I feel like I come across this type of thing a lot. That is, I feel like I come across many situations in all my stats stuff where the correct answer can be achieved by seemingly “simple” methods that, in actuality, are incorrect method-wise but still lead to correct answers.

But again, I might be imagining it.

Anyway, I felt this an adequate topic for today’s blog, as I’m sure we’ve all come across problems like this but were not (at least, I was not) aware that such things had an actual name.

Numbers are crazy buggers, aren’t they?

Edit: Get your butts over to YouTube and listen to this awesome discussion of Leibniz’ Monadology. This pretty much made my week.

Edit 2: I don’t know why I didn’t just embed the freaking video in the first place. Claudia dumb!