ABSTRACT
You go on the tennis court to play tennis, not to see if the lines are straight. -Robert Frost
INTRODUCTION
William of Ockham (1280-1349) was an English scholastic philosopher. In an era when highly convoluted arguments were used to prove how many angels could dance on the head ofa pin, he proposed his principle ofparsimony (now also known as "Ockham's razor"): "What can be done with fewer [assumptions] is done in vain with more." Unfortunately, modem statistics is often in need of a shave.
