Ah, Academia....

[sasha]

A chemist, a physicist, and a statistician are scheduled to meet with the college dean, and are in the foyer waiting to be called. While they're waiting, a fire unexpectedly breaks out in a wastebasket.

"Quick!" the chemist says. "Find something to cover the basket! Once we've deprived the fire of one of its reactants, it will go out!"

"No!" the physicist says. "We must first lower the fuel's temperature below its ignition point. Find a water cooler!"

Meanwhile, the statistician has been running around the room setting additional fires. "What do you think you're doing?" the other two shriek.

The statistician looks at them with surprise. "Why," he answers, "trying to get an adequate sample size..."

[saw]

how often we over analyze
I mean sometimes a yes or no will do just fine....

[sasha]

book smart, street stupid..........

I've been guilty of that sin myself. True story: I once used a wonderful scientific software package called UnScan-It. Excel is fine for turning tables of numbers into charts and graphs - and no software yet written can match the human brain's ability to detect visual patterns that such graphs often contain. But sometimes you need those numbers to perform other mass operations, like finding the area beneath the curve or the slope of the curve at each point. Published graphs seldom include the raw data that created them - so UnScan-It would analyze the image file of the graph and return an Excel file of numbers. Well, I once was mailed an Excel file with a nice graph - but no data. All I had to do was paste a screen shot of the graph into UnScan-It and let it do its magic. But did I do that? Oh, no. I printed out the graph - scanned the printout - and mailed that scanned copy to myself. I did this at least twice before I realized what an intellectually muscle-bound idiot I was being......