Does Not Compute

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Does Not Compute
lyrics © 2007 by Dr. H. Paul Shuch
Sung to a melody suggested by The Bonnie Ship The Diamond (traditional)

Click on the speaker icon to hear this melody

The sexy statistician with her tables and her charts
Is equally proficient in the sciences and arts.
Weigh the softness in her touch against the sharpness of her pen
And it might just be enough to make me wish to try again.
Yet, although her mind is brilliant and her insights quite astute,
There are some things that just do not compute.

There's magic in her formulae, a beauty in her graphs,
And she sparkles when she smiles at me, and twinkles when she laughs.
She is quite at home with figures (and her own will stop you dead).
Still, I wonder if what I have heard is really what she said,
Or merely my projection which I'm hoping will bear fruit.
These are the things that just do not compute.

I want to know her better. Computations do not lie;
I can calculate the very instant that she caught my eye
With her Weibull distributions, her binomial displays,
And those curves, forever Gaussian in oh, so many ways!
No, her beauty and intelligence were never in dispute,
But there are things that still do not compute.

Must all love be conditional, and Bayesian as well,
Or can ours be an outlier? Time and sample size will tell.
You can run the simulation, but with each successive round
The likelihood diminishes of finding what we've found.
I can't quantify emotion, but I know what's at the root,
And that is what I'm trying to compute.

I'm searching for a union (intersections are too brief)
That can last beyond six sigma. It is firmly my belief
That the probability of finding love to last the years
Diminishes directly in proportion to our fears.
So, I'll reach her asymptotically. The dream remains acute,
No matter what refuses to compute.

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