Contributing Editor Xiao-Li Meng writes:

My new year’s reading started with a holiday gift: On the Money, a collection of over 400 cartoons in The New Yorker from 1925–2009. No, after months of learning about fundraising, money was least alluring on a day when my alarm clock took a rest. But I could use a few laughs, even at my own expense or with irony. Indeed, the gift was from an alumna, and I wondered if it was meant to be a friendly reminder: relax, don’t take money (and your job) too seriously.

Gladwell’s long answer began with an anecdote of how stunned he was at a corporate retreat, when a CFO used a business-like PowerPoint presentation to tell his life story. It ended with the key point: “People who want the world to conform to the principles of business are Realists. People who think the other way around—this is true whether they spend their days parsing sonnets or actuarial tables—are Romantics, and the Romantic position … is the comic position.”

You will be laughing now, or in a few seconds, if you are a real statistician. Otherwise you would be laughing at how nerdy statisticians must be if they can find humor in the number six. What makes this story greatly humorous to statisticians is the mixing of a well-understood commonality (standard deviation is commonly denoted by $σ$) and an unexpected individuality (the student’s mistaking $σ$ for 6). It would not be humorous at all if six were replaced by one because George, for whatever reason, decided to use the letter l for standard deviation in his course.