Decimate the competition
Where measurement and etymology meet. Getting some refresher info on mutually exclusive random sampling, I came across a definition of “decimate”.
Decimation (Latin: decimatio; decem = “ten”) was a form of military discipline used by officers in the Roman Army to punish mutinous or cowardly soldiers. The word decimation is derived from Latin meaning “removal of a tenth.
OMG, really? I see the connection now…”dec”, like “decimal” in a base-ten system.
So apparently (according to Wikipedia), a form of punishment for Roman Soldiers was to decimate them…to literally choose one soldier in 10 by lottery and have the other nine soldiers kill that one by stoning or clubbing (and not the kind of clubbing practiced in trendy downtown neighborhoods by festive hipsters, either).
The most interesting thing here (to me) is that some professor, whose statistics class notes are randomly available online, felt compelled to explain this little tidbit of trivia as an example of appropriate random population sampling. Dark, yes?
Bring this up in conversation today, I dare you.
~Geek~
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