by Kris Langman
The farmer pulled a grimy handkerchief out of his sleeve and blew his nose. “Dang right I never question him. Don’t want to get hauled up in front of the Council, do I? They’re in his pocket, ain’t they? Everyone knows that.”
Nikki nodded tiredly and pulled the piece of parchment out of her jeans pocket. Maleficious certainly had a lot of power in the Realm. Almost as much as the king himself. Most of the people she’d talked to seemed afraid of him. She un-stoppered her little jar of ink and dipped in her quill. “Okay, so, just a couple more questions. When did your cold start?”
“Tuesday morn. I woke up with the most awful head pain. Put on my socks right away.” The farmer pointed down at his legs, which were encased in heavy wool, the right leg in royal blue, the left in bright yellow.
“And how are you feeling now?”
“Bit better. Still sniveling, but less.”
Nikki nodded. “Today is Friday, so that makes it four days.” She put a check mark in the appropriate box while the farmer looked on suspiciously.
“Okay,” said Nikki as brightly as she could manage, “that’s it. Thanks very much for your help.” She hurried away over the rough furrows of the corn field, feeling the wary gaze of the farmer between her shoulder blades. She did a quick count of the checkmarks on her piece of parchment. She’d collected data from forty different test subjects. Time to head back to the castle and compare notes with the imps.
* * * *
“Sixty-four! Wow, Athena, that’s great. Good work.” Nikki spread Athena’s piece of parchment on the table next to her own. “Okay, Fuzz. How many test subjects did you find?”
“Eight,” said Fuzz, grumpily handing over his piece of parchment, which was mangled and scrunched and gave off a yeasty smell. “I couldn’t find any sick people in my part of town.”
“But you managed to find a tavern,” said Athena, wrinkling her nose. “You smell like the inside of an ale glass, Fuzz.”
Fuzz ignored her. He lay down on the table and closed his eyes.
Nikki un-scrunched Fuzz’s parchment and laid it next to the others. She tore off a new sheet from the roll and dipped her quill in ink. “Okay, I’m just going to make a new grid and combine all three of our counts into one. Give me a sec.”
Athena waited patiently as Nikki’s quill scratched across the parchment. Fuzz began to snore.
“Okay,” said Nikki, laying down her quill. “Let’s look at our results.”
Athena prodded Fuzz with her foot. Fuzz gave a loud snort and sat up, grumbling.
“Let’s deal with the outliers first,” said Nikki.
“What’s an outlier, Miss?” asked Athena.
“It’s a statistical term. It means something which doesn’t fit. Something so out of the ordinary that you should leave it out of your count. Our grids have two categories which I’m going to call outliers: the ‘Cured in one day’ category, and the ‘Not cured’ category.” She pointed to the grid, and Athena walked across the table to get a closer look.
“There is only one checkmark in each of these categories, Miss.”
“Exactly,” said Nikki. “That’s why I’m going to classify them as outliers and leave them out of our results. Mathematicians usually say that you shouldn’t exclude outliers unless you have a good reason, but in this case I think there is a good reason. We know from experience that colds are rarely cured in one day. That’s why only one of our test subjects fell into this category. We can’t be sure, but we can make an educated guess as to why the subject fell into this ‘one day’ category. Maybe what they had was not a cold, but allergies. Same thing with the ‘Not cured’ category. For a common cold it’s unlikely that there would be no improvement at all in five days, so we can guess that what the test subject had was not a cold, but something more serious, like bronchitis.” She drew a slash across the two categories. “There, we’ve excluded them. Now, let’s focus on the remaining categories.” She tapped the parchment with the end of her quill. “See anything interesting?”
Athena bent forward until her nose was almost touching the parchment. “Most of the checkmarks are in the category called ‘Cured in three days’, Miss.”
Nikki nodded. “I don’t know about you, but from my own experience with colds I’ve found that I’m mostly better by the third day after becoming sick. So, our data matches with previous experience, which is a good sign. If our data was way out of line with existing knowledge and experience we might have to conclude that something had gone wrong with our test, and we’d have to do it all over again. But, I think we’re okay.” She tapped the grid again. “This is what’s really interesting. There are forty-nine checkmarks in the box for ‘Cured in three days and wearing socks’, and there are fifty-one checkmarks in the box for ‘Cured in three days and not wearing socks’.”
Athena frowned down at the grid. Even Fuzz got up and ambled over to take a look.
“What’s so interesting about that?” he asked.
“What’s interesting is how similar the counts are. We can form a conclusion from this. A conclusion which indicates that our hypothesis is false.”
Athena looked from Nikki to the grid in confusion. Fuzz scratched his head, unleashing a tiny shower of dandruff. “I don’t get it,” he said.
Nikki laid her original piece of parchment on top of the piece with the combined totals. “See? Here’s what our experiment was trying to prove:”
Hypothesis: the wearing of mismatched socks cures colds.
“Now, if our hypothesis was correct, then we should have seen a much bigger number of checkmarks in all of the ‘wearing socks’ boxes. That would indicate that the socks were working – actually curing colds. Instead, there’s a total of one hundred checkmarks in the ‘Cured in three days column’, split between socks and no socks. We see an even split, almost fifty-fifty, between the two boxes.”
Athena began jumping up and down, rattling the wobbly table. “Oh, Miss. I see! I see! It means the socks made no difference! People’s colds went away in three days, whether they were wearing the socks or not!”
“Exactly,” said Nikki.
Fuzz nodded sagely. “It means that doofus Maleficious is wrong. His stupid socks don’t cure colds. They probably don’t cure anything at all.”
Nikki nodded. “We’d better go present our results to the king.”
The Hamsters Rule Series
Hamsters Rule, Gerbils Drool
Hamsters Rule the School
The Logic to the Rescue series
Logic to the Rescue
The Prince of Physics
The Bard of Biology
Mystics and Medicine
The Sorcerer of the Stars
