Dreamtime

Last time a dream in some work environment, nowhere in particular, but in tone, the old-style, comfortable civil service environment in which I spent most of my working life.

We had an expensive consultant working on something or other in order to reduce the risk of something.

I pointed out some important flaw in the statistical argument on which this work rested.

The consultant saw what I was getting at straight away, while most of my colleagues did not.

As it  happened, the colleague who was actually responsible for the work was on leave, so I volunteered to write up the statistical argument. Always best to be in charge of the written record.

At which point the dream changes gear, as it were, and I am struggling to remember how to build and edit a document - the writing up just volunteered - using a command line editor. Using the systems we used before one just double clicked on the (Microsoft) Word icon or on the File Explorer icon for a pre-existing Word document.

Gradually I wake up, to find that the important flaw has become more or less inaccessible. All I can recover is a rule that says if you do lots of independent trials, the risk of something untoward happening in one of them increases linearly with the number of trials. Which doesn't work because eventually you get to a probability which is more than one, which is not allowed. Waking up still more I get to the binomial theorem, with its expansion of (a + b) to the power of n, where n is the number of trials and a + b = 1. And where the increase is real enough but not linear. I associate to Dr. Bayes, who barely existed in my frequentist day.

I then turned my attention to command line editors, which I used to use back in the days of something British called George III, in its day - the mid 1970's - a very advanced computer operating system. And gradually the workings of command line editors came back to me, rather different from the editor that comes with Windows and Word. I look around for a suitable illustration to this post and the best I can do is something lifted from reference 1. Evocative for me; probably not for someone who has never used such things.

Along the way I learn that there are people out there, probably white males of my sort of age, who indulge in George III nostalgia, in effect building museums about same.

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEORGE_%28operating_system%29.