http://blogs.scienceforums.net/anewworld/2008/03/23/handwaving-my-way-through-explaining-handwaving/ My ramblings about science.... Wed, 20 Aug 2008 18:45:58 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5.1 http://blogs.scienceforums.net/anewworld/2008/03/23/handwaving-my-way-through-explaining-handwaving/#comment-14 the tree Thu, 03 Apr 2008 09:10:29 +0000 http://blogs.scienceforums.net/anewworld/2008/03/23/handwaving-my-way-through-explaining-handwaving/#comment-14 I've come to view hand waving as skipping rigour in situations when rigour just isn't interesting. "some phenomena happens randomly" is handwavey whereas "so-and-so goodness of fit test [source] for the Poisson distribution over the intervals between each event [source] gives a test statistic of blah blah blah etc etc so we can accept that it happens randomly [source]" is not, so for the sake of getting things done, handwaving can be quite a good thing. I’ve come to view hand waving as skipping rigour in situations when rigour just isn’t interesting. “some phenomena happens randomly” is handwavey whereas “so-and-so goodness of fit test [source] for the Poisson distribution over the intervals between each event [source] gives a test statistic of blah blah blah etc etc so we can accept that it happens randomly [source]” is not, so for the sake of getting things done, handwaving can be quite a good thing.

]]> http://blogs.scienceforums.net/anewworld/2008/03/23/handwaving-my-way-through-explaining-handwaving/#comment-13 antimatter Sun, 23 Mar 2008 16:07:09 +0000 http://blogs.scienceforums.net/anewworld/2008/03/23/handwaving-my-way-through-explaining-handwaving/#comment-13 ... I think I'm going to have to read that again... …
I think I’m going to have to read that again…

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