Last week I enjoyed a relaxing sojourn up in the north woods of Wisconsin. The resort encompasses its own pristine pine-ringed lake featuring a 26-foot fishing hole. Just before I headed off for my vacation I read this Scientific American report on The Mind-Reading Salmon: The True Meaning of Statistical Significance
. Although I think they meant to be disrespectful of p-values in this case, my feeling, based on empirical evidence from a large sample size – hundreds of unsuccessful casts of my lure around the shore and over the hole, is that some fish living in isolated areas have developed mental telepathy. How else do they avoid being caught?
PS. Here’s a picture of me in happier days at a different lake last summer. My brother-in-law insisted that the first one to catch a crappie would have to kiss it. Evidently this fish thought it might be fun to try, knowing I’d then release it back into the lake.