I love "Community"

And it's not just because they think that Statistics professors are hot. Although that doesn't hurt. I mean, I knew it was true, it's just high time the rest of the world caught on.

For those who didn't see the Halloween episode, post credits finds Jeff ogling his stats prof while lecture is ending. She begins with "The Bernoulli distribution is the number of successes in a sequence of independent yes/no experiments."

Now anyone who has taken a probability course (and hopefully my students come next Wednesday's midterm) knows that is in fact the definition of a binomial distribution, not a Bernoulli. So as is my usual practice, I headed over to Wikipedia to make sure that no one had fooled with definition again.

To my delight, I found "...the binomial distribution is the discrete probability distribution of the number of successes in a sequence of n independent yes/no experiments". Now that is too close a wording to be an accident. The writers ripped a line right out of Wikipedia. Chutzpah of that level is to be admired, and that's reason enough for me to love the show.

But it goes further than that. If they lifted the line from Wikipedia, why the Bernoulli/binomial switch? Only after watching the show to the end did I realize that the character was going to exhibit a holier-than-thou attitude towards the students the whole way through, even going so far as to introduce herself later as "Michelle Slater, Ph.D.". Who does that?

So here's my theory: they intentionally had her make a mistake at the beginning to establish that while she thinks she's all that, in fact she's a bit of a dim bulb. Naturally I went trolling through the tape afterward to search for further errors.

And indeed, I was not disappointed! As my students should also know by this point of the semester, the square of the standard deviation is the variance. However, what was written across the top of the board was "Sqaire S.D. to get vairiance" Okay, so vairiance could just be another error, but "Sqaire". That had to be intentional. But there's more. On the board, a calculation appears that is equivalent to saying 2 + 3 + 3 = 12. You don't have to be Good Will Hunting to get that right.

The piece de resistance? The most well known theorem in probability, abbreviated CLT, is the Central Limit Theorem. What's written on the board? Central Limiting.

Here's hoping that these are intentional jokes, or some writers need to get their college tuition refunded, post haste.