Okay, I am more than a quarter century out from my statistics course and am too lazy to look it up to provide a more specific explanation for DS. Anyhow, he was complaining that the standard deviation formula was unnecessarily complicated since you have to take the square root of the sum of the squares of the differences divided by sample size. He argued that a simpler formula using absolute values would lead to the same result. I pointed out that the formula was derived to apply to all kinds of data sets even though his simpler formula applies to the data sets at issue. It may be due to caffeine deprivation but I can't recall off the top of my head specific examples. Anyone?
