This weekend M told me about Minard’s representation of Napoleon’s Russian campaign.

While I was looking up Minard’s work, I found out that Florence Nightingale was a statistician. I’m annoyed that I’m only now learning this. She was the first female member of the Royal Statistical Society and an honorary member of the American Statistical Association, but if yesterday someone had said to me, "Quick, tell me everything you know about Florence Nightingale!" the best I could have done was, "She was a nurse in the Crimean War. They called her 'The Lady with the Lamp'."

And if that person then asked, "When was the Crimean War and who fought in it?" I would say, "Mid nineteenth century. England, France, Turkey, Russia." And if that person wanted to know how I knew that, I would say, "When I was an English major The Charge of the Light Brigade was still in the canon."

And then I would say, "Canon, get it? ‘Cannon to the right of them, cannon to the left of them...’?" and if that terrible joke didn't scare them away and they asked me, "What do you know about Alfred, Lord Tennyson?" I would say, "He was Poet Laureate in Victorian England. Now get away from me, you question-asking freak!"