Nice article, though parts seem needlessly politicised, as Kaj noted. Also seems it could use editing in places. Just one example -
French officials were expected to collect statistics on all sorts of things: cholera victims, the chest sizes of soldiers, the number of Prussian officers killed by kicking horses
Seems historically implausible, unless them were French horses..
That’s actually a famous example in statistics and probability, from Bortkiewicz’s book on the Law of Small Numbers. Like Laplace and Bayes, Bortkiewicz did the heavy lifting on an idea named after someone else (in this case, the Poisson distribution). As Bortkiewicz was Polish, German, or Russian (depending on how you look at things), it doesn’t make sense to lump him in with French officials.
Oops. I think I started the sentence listing only things French officials were expected to do, and then added more things to the list as I kept reading without appropriately making the subject of the sentence more general. Fixed.
Nice article, though parts seem needlessly politicised, as Kaj noted. Also seems it could use editing in places. Just one example -
Seems historically implausible, unless them were French horses..
That’s actually a famous example in statistics and probability, from Bortkiewicz’s book on the Law of Small Numbers. Like Laplace and Bayes, Bortkiewicz did the heavy lifting on an idea named after someone else (in this case, the Poisson distribution). As Bortkiewicz was Polish, German, or Russian (depending on how you look at things), it doesn’t make sense to lump him in with French officials.
Oops. I think I started the sentence listing only things French officials were expected to do, and then added more things to the list as I kept reading without appropriately making the subject of the sentence more general. Fixed.