Lyrics and music ©2025 by Lawrence Mark Lesser
They brought me in to survey how people use their yards.
I took a random sample: the fun was off the charts:
Some use their yards for parties [woohoo!], most use them to relax,
Many dine and grill, some play with their pets.
I love to say I get to play
in ev’ryone’s backyard,
in ev’ryone’s backyard!
They brought me in to measure everyone’s homestead
For scary heavy metals like arsenic and lead. [yikes!]
The project had great meaning, well worth the toil:
Now all the gard’ners know what’s in their soil!
I love to say I get to play
in ev’ryone’s backyard,
in ev’ryone’s backyard!
They brought me in to brainstorm an experiment to find
What makes kale grow best -- with a split-plot design:
I helped them understand what claims were sound.
I stood by the Hedges’ gee, I stood on solid ground!
I love to say I get to play
in ev’ryone’s backyard, ev’ryone….!
I love to say I get to play
in ev’ryone’s backyard,
ev’rybody’s yard….
best job by far….in ev’ryone’s backyard…
where the nearest neighbors are…..
Ev’ry day, a new way,
I get to play in ev’ryone’s backyard!
by Lawrence Mark Lesser
Math seeks
structure once
context boils off.
Not in statistics
where context informs method
and interpretation.
So when a statistician sits with context
to write poetry,
she can play
in everyone’s yard,
where sampling
yields found poetry,
where visualization
yields imagery.
Her couplets like matched pairs,
even those imperfectly rhymed,
a tail rhyme on a heavy tail.
She picks
poem size
for higher power
and adjusted R².
With elliptical confidence,
she settles for nothing
but the best
fitting line, jittering
phonetics, poetics, semantics, and linguistics.
Wrangling rawness, she scans and trims
for robustness
‘til datum yields
punctum.
