I’ve been trying to stay out of saying anything about the Hugos Awards, mostly because lots of people are saying lots of things already and I haven’t felt like I have anything to add. But then Jim Hines posted today speculating about MATH, and, well, I got nerd-sniped.

Here’s the original (long, long) comment I left on his blog. I finally decided I couldn’t not do a normal distribution and standard dev, so I came back here for it, but the numbers in the original comment might be a bit more in...