mathematical folly

[inhumandecency]

I just spent a little over an hour writing up a very careful description of a method of calculating time-adjusted area under the curve for diurnal cortisol, so I could ask for help verifying my math before I sent it to an important person. I tested the first part of the formula several times until I was sure I had it right, then tested the second.

Comments

[dragonpaws]

Yes, but could you have figured it out any other way? Or in other words, was "divide by 15" the obvious solution BEFORE you did all the math?

Sometimes when a very complicated thing I'm doing reduces to something stupidly simple, I figure maybe the only way for me to get to the stupidly simple was through the idiotically complex. :)

[inhumandecency]

That's what everyone in the lab group suggested we do in the first place. But then they went off on a tangent about how [important person] and [other important person] considered this an intractable problem and didn't think you could ever use AUC because it was conflated with time awake, and so I figured it couldn't be as simple as just dividing by # of hours awake (15, in the example case). So I was misled a little in addition to being stupid.