Is an SPSS monster like a SAS bunny rabbit?

A friend of mine had a Google Talk status of "Now I'm the SPSS monster" today. Lately, I have picked up the contagious habit of making fun of people who use gooey (GUI) SPSS, and so I responded by e-mail, "Is an SPSS monster like a SAS bunny rabbit?" She responded, "Could be. Or an R-invader." I couldn't resist letting this snowball turn into the avalanche it really could be, and so...

Kick S. Way to JMP on that one and even Z-score. Such a rejoinder makes me want to click away to one of the Minitabs of my browser. Phew, all of this stat talk makes me want to regress back into MATLAB; even if I am still centrally limited there, at least I can feel normal again.

Anyway, I wasn't trying to be mean. If I was, I hope you won't log this transformation and hold it against me later. I'm certain I can transcend and function better in the future; a higher power law need not intervene. Hopefully this hypothesis is correct and you will see some significant change. That should help you restore your confidence.

On a different note, I saw some Monte Carlo tulips at the zoo last weekend; it seems risky to have planted those at this time of the season, but hopefully they will Excel. If they do die, I'm afraid this story will have a heavy tail indeed.

By the way, yesterday for graduate appreciation day, Jessie got a coupon for $1 coffee at the expensive campus Starbucks. With the discount, prices are about normal. I guess there is no such thing as a scale free lunch. Shoot, I'm afraid my coffee has gone cold and is starting to taste a little bit like Poisson.

Well, enough of this. I'm sure if you remove the outlier that is e-mail thread, you'll find that the remaining e-mails are far less skewed and better fit the distribution you have come to expect.

I hope all of your days are better than average! --
Ted

There are parts of that that I'm not that excited about, but overall I'm pretty proud of myself.