Geek-speak

The CB2 catalog came in the mail Friday. I love their stuff. And I guess green and orange is still a hip color combination. I'm glad. :)

Also got a copy of my professional journal last week, and thumbed through the articles to see what the technocrats in my society were pushing as being hot research these days.

Ooof.

Here's a sampling:

"Interval Estimation of the Credibility Factor"

"The Bornhuetter-Ferguson Principle"

"Two Approaches to Calculating Correlated Reserve Indications Across Multiple Lines of Business"

"Models of Insurance Claim Counts with Time Dependence Based on Generalization of Poisson and Negative Binomial Distributions"

Yum! Doesn't it make your mouth water just to think of these topics?

Especially the one about Poisson distributions. Poisson is French for fish, as fans of Disney's "The Little Mermaid" will recall, when the chef is in the kitchen chopping the heads off fish and singing:

Les Poissons! Les Poissons!
hee hee hee ah ha haa!
Weeth ze cleeverrr I hack zem in two.
I pull out what's inside
And I serve eet up fried
'Cause I love leettle feeshes, don't you?

Mai oui, mon ami. Zat I do.

Poisson is pronounced pwa-sohn, but the statistical distribution has nothing to do with fish. They named it after some French guy who's the one who made the thing up. That used to be good to know, back in the days when I was taking exams for this stuff, but it's in the category of useless trivia now. I prefer to think about grilling salmon and the Little Mermaid. :P

So yes, I actually read a couple articles, and yes, understood them. Mostly.

One of them actually has application to a project I'm working on. Imagine that. It actually pays to read this stuff. Hm!

Or maybe I should say... "ah ha haa!"