Quotes About Variability

A lot of the differences between people have biologic underpinnings. Now, we have a dogma of egalitarianism. Everyone's the same.

We boil at different degrees.

In some environments, roles shift and change each period depending on what the company's needs are. On the other hand, many functional roles can become very repetitive if you perform similar tasks over and over again.

Everything is in a state of flux, including the status quo.

An estimate is not a number. An estimate is a distribution.

My policy is to have no policy. ABRAHAM LINCOLN, 1809–1865

Sometimes six and six make a dozen, and sometimes they make a mess

Genes have plenty to do with behavior. Even more appropriately, all behavioral traits are affected to some degree by genetic variability.65 They have to be, given that they specify the structure of all the proteins pertinent to every neurotransmitter, hormone, receptor, etc. that there is. And they have plenty to do with individual differences in behavior, given the large percentage of genes that are polymorphic, coming in different flavors. But their effects are supremely context dependent.

If genes strongly influence average levels of a trait, that trait is strongly inherited. If genes strongly influence the extent of variability around that average level, that trait has high heritability.

This is my night for being Betty, because I love everything in the world tonight. I was Elizabeth last night, and tomorrow night I'll probably be Beth. It all depends on how I feel.' ... 'How very nice to have a name you can change so easily and still feel it's your own.

Everybody is a little insane on some points

While nothing is more uncertain than a single life, nothing is more certain than the average duration of a thousand lives.

Real numbers are good if you add the word 'random'.

A further subtlety of a histogram which distinguishes it from the bar chart is that the widths of its bars (which correspond to the class intervals) need not all be the same.

Educators say that every child can learn, but they understand that children learn at different rates and that some inevitably learn more than others.

Life is so random and seasonal.

The coefficient of variation is a measure of variability that is computed as the ratio between the standard deviation and the mean of a probability distribution. You can think of it as a general measure of the relative breadth of a probability distribution. Since the square of the standard deviation is the variance of a distribution, this means that queues vary linearly with variance, a point worth remembering.

Never, never, never think - that's one lesson you should have in life. Never think that lack of variability is stability.

The great thing about this life of ours is that you can be someone different to everybody.

My parents were consistently inconsistent.

Constancy is nothing but a languishing and wavering dance

Nobody can tell about this California climate. One minute its hot and the next minute its cold, so a person never knows what to hock.

Society and medicine treat us all as members of populations, whereas as individuals we are all unique, and population statistics do not apply.

Because of the diverse conditions of humans, it happens that some acts are virtuous to some people, as appropriate and suitable to them, while the same acts are immoral for others, as inappropriate to them.