Walking Commentary
Manchester to Rome 2022
In a normal world, there are people who study deviations beyond the standard. There’s a conventional heuristic (rule of thumb) that our most significant interests fall within three standard deviations from the meanest of any measure.
I journaled here of a corporate presentation I titled ‘To 3σ and Beyond’. That, together with the opening paragraph today, are (bad) statistics-based jokes intended to refer to new learnings that may lurk within less than 6.7% of a range of products or data.
We heard the siren call of the seals this afternoon. Pod, rookery or harem, there were upwards of a dozen of the pinnipeds basking in the diffuse light on rocks exposed by a very low tide.
It was befitting of Bloom’s Day to see the seals in Sandycove where James Joyce spent six nights in 1904. ‘A sleek brown head, a seal’s, far out on the water, round’ was his description of Buck Mulligan in Ulysses. Could this have been inspired by the Sandycove ancestors of these seals?
