An experiment turned sour.

For whatever reason, perhaps the deficiencies in our educational system, mathematics has always been tagged as something artificial, abstruse and impractical.  I won’t try to win over the ones on the other side of the group of math maniacs onto our side. But through this post, I want to share an experiment, which has its underlying ideas in math, and the heartbreaking results that I had gotten from it.

There is this method in statistics called the regression method. The qualitative idea of which is to estimate the effect of a particular parameter on a dependent quantity, by varying this parameter ONLY. Say we wanted to understand why people watch Balayya Babu’s movies: Firstly we need to know the parameters which might be involved. Things which crop up in my mind as prospective parameters are: Caste feeling, joblessness, relatives of the hero, fans of his dialogue rendering capability etc. To quantify the effect of the first parameter, we need to hold the remaining ones constant and see the difference. (How an experiment as subjective as this can be conducted is just as enigmatic to me as how people survive his movies, but just an example none the less to drive home the idea; by the way, the category of people justifying the super human’s (I mean Balayya’s) stardom by his awesome dialogue delivery never fail to amuse me – people with such skills become dubbing artists and NOT actors, try to beat that argument and then we will talk)

So, along these lines, what I do is – come any occasion I call up my close friends and wish them. This made sense because a call was more personal than an online chat. And calls spread over a period of time give us topics to converse upon; lest should we irritate each other with “what else or wassups” if we were to chat daily. All was well, I was calling for a while (2-3 months). On one fine occasion I decide not to call (analogous to checking the effect of one single parameter). And the response! only a couple of them call me back. It’s amazing how this simple idea could be used to segregate the loyal lot out of your friends clutter.  

On a different matter, math if studied in its truest sense enlightens you like no other subject can. If interested, refer to my post “Reductio-ad-absurdum” for applications of another math principle to our daily life.

P.S: My friends with a decent memory might remember my status which read "Apply regression method to life, you will be started by the results". This was the thought process behind it.