A good reading

I wrote this post actually for another's course Blackboard, but I have a strong suspicion nobody else in that class is using it - so I though that I will post it here, for your benefit. It is somewhat OT as far as our DG course goes - but it's a good book, and we all need a break sometimes :)

There is short reading I'd like to recommend to all of you. It is not an academic article, far from it - it is an old (1959) short story by Stanisław Lem, a (fairly) famous Polish writer. It is a great story about statistics and academia. And it's a good mystery :)

What is the goal of scientific inquiry? What does the existence of competing explanations mean for that goal? To what extent is such a mathematical correspondence a satisfactory explanation? To what extent do we tolerate such explanations in science?

Related links:
* excerpts
* more exceprts
* Amazon entry/review

The book is available at the Hillman Library - General Collection:

Sledztwo. English
The investigation [by] Stanislaw Lem. Translated from the Polish by Adele Milch. New York, Seabury Press, 216p. Call Number: PG7158.L39 S4513, not checked out at the time I looked the record.

Enjoy!