flinn@seismo.UUCP (E. A. Flinn) (12/11/83)
There was a comment recently in net.games about certain sets of characteristics in rogue being "better" than others which had exactly the same labels, whereas the characteristics are actually assigned at random, and the people who saw differences are deluding themselves. This happens a good deal in the hard sciences, where one has to have a knack of seeing patterns in noisy data. For example, Teddy Bullard, an English geophysicist who had been a student of Rutherford's, once said that when Rutherford discovered the alpha particle, he was convinced that there were patterns, both in space and time, of the flashes of light on the crt; apparently Rutherford spent many hours recording times and places of the flashes, and it was only with the greatest reluctance that he finally discarded the idea.