Phil wrote in the "recent illogical conflation" thread: << It's rather "the enemy of my enemy is my friend"-like, which is also commonly used.
This reminds me of an interesting statistics thang: (I don't recall posting this here, but if I did please forgive me.) PUZZLE ------ Given real-valued random variables X,Y,Z in a joint distribution, suppose that the correlation coefficient* between any two of them is the same number C. QUESTION: What is the minimum value, over all such joint distributions, that C can take? (We assume all means and variances are finite.) --Dan _____________________________________________________________ * There are several types of correlation coefficient, but this refers to what is by far the commonest one: CC(U,V) = E(U_s * V_s) where W_s denotes the standardized version of the random variable W: W_s := (W - E(W)) / sd(W) where E is expectation and sd is standard deviation. _____________________________________________________________________ "It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that certain je ne sais quoi." --Peter Schickele