Yesterday I had a little statistics crisis. Long story short, I wanted to calculate a linear fit of a list of 1000 numbers in one of my programs. Having a college education serves the purpose of knowing that the problem I have can be solved by a linear fit, but unfortunately (as with so many things) studying it in school has not caused me to actually remember how to do it.

Thus, I go to Google and attempt to find something like "Calculating Linear Fit". And I have to laugh because almost every result that I could find contained one crucial instruction that I was unable to follow:

Type the following command into MATLAB ...

Remember those Star Trek plots in which our intrepid heroes stumble upon a planet full of people who worship the computer system built by their anscestors, and nobody knows how it works anymore and can't fix it when it goes crazy and starts demanding human sacrifices? Well, this is undoubtedly how it starts.