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- Take the example of a rod quivering in an earthquake
-
, 
are n measurements of the length of a rod.
- Owing to a Gaussian earthquake (or a Gaussian, i.e., normal
drunkenness) occurring during the measurement, the
are scattered
about the true value.
- You visit your favorite theorist (or do it yourself after
sobering up) who believes that the probability distribution of
is Gaussian with mean 
true length and standard
deviation 
.
- Our superstar knows the value of
but not of
.
- We may write down the (relative) probability of each measurement
as:
Geoffrey Fox, Northeast Parallel Architectures Center at Syracuse University, gcf@npac.syr.edu