A/N: Based off something my science teacher said in class. Yes, I’m a nerd, don’t say it. It really sounds Sesame Street-ish or something, doesn’t it? :D Review! BTW, a datum is a unit of data.

Bob the Datum

Bob was a datum. He came into being when a middle school student was doing an experiment with heat. As the Fahrenheit and Celsius temperatures were read off the thermometer, Bob poofed into being inside a green marble notebook.

Bob the datum liked his life. He was all snug and cozy as a point on the Fahrenheit/Celsius Relation graph, and it made him feel important. But one day, everything went wrong.

The student who owned the notebook had to hand it in soon, so he got out his pen and came around to draw a best-fit line.

It would have been perfect, except for Bob.

“I hate you, you lousy datum!” cried the student. “You threw off my whole line! You stupid outlier! I hate you!”

Bob was sad. The bad line, the line that was all his fault, made the equation wrong. Now, when the student converted Celsius into Fahrenheit and Fahrenheit into Celsius, his results were horribly different from the accepted values. The percent error was enormous. The other points on his graph booed and jeered at him, angry because he had made the line move away from them. The data on the graph on the next page, the actual values, laughed at him from across the binding. Bob cried himself to sleep that night.

But the next morning, he was full of determination. He knew that he should say that 212 degrees F was equal to 100 degrees C. He tried and tried and tried, tried as hard as he could, until pop, he became the point 212,100.

Bob was overjoyed! When the student got to school, Bob proudly readied himself for the notebook to be opened and the graph to be admired.

The science teacher shook her head gravely. “You didn’t actually get this point, did you?” she asked the student, who shook his head. “You changed the data,” she said. “212 Celsius is not 100 Fahrenheit.”

Fahrenheit was on the y-axis! Bob had failed. He had made the graph even worse. He hung his head.

“You made things worse by changing, Bob,” said the science teacher to the datum. “What’s the point of doing an experiment if you throw away your own information and use what you already know? Remember,” she said to the little point on the graph, “there’s no one you can be but yourself.”

A/N: Lol… I was just really really bored… tell me what you think!!!