Contributed by
Vijay Fafat
A short story about a statistician who believes in the
second coming of Christ and looks for it in the statistical
correlations between the events and people's reactions to
those events (e.g. "14% of college-educated housewives
believe in stronger repressive measures against the
drug-culture, 51% of working class males above the median
salary believe television is a government plot").
Presumably, he's looking for spikes in certain types of
correlations which could signal His arrival.. He gets so
obsessed that his marriage suffers ("my wife says, 'you're
just a cold-hearted statistician who only sees people as
numbers and trends'") along with his professional life
("simple statistical errors, flaws of computation a child
would not have made, misplacement of median and mode" and
"today I missed an entire distribution curve").
His obsession leads him to suspect that He might show
up as a regular character in his daily life and
half-believes the crazed beggar into whom he runs during
lunch hour one day might be Jesus. Turns out that the crazed
beggar really was a lunatic; the beggar attacks him without
reason, putting him out of commission for a few days. After
that, the statistician starts leading a normal life
but then has a new vision... he sees Christ in the
statistical fact that 47% of Dayton, Ohio, does not believe
in the teachings of any of the various Churches...
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