"Every academic discipline has its own peculiarities, and let me start by pointing out a peculiarity that my own topic (math probability) inherits from its parent mathematics. Just about every University offers an undergraduate course in math probability, and as a student in such a course what you actually do is about 100 homework problem of this kind. The top ones are ``just math" without any attempt at a real-world explanation, and the bottom two are weird made-up stories (poisonous mushrooms and car mufflers) referring to real-world items but not attempting to be empirically realistic. If you come from say Medieval History, you might think I've chosen some extreme example, but (alas!) different textbooks differ only in the the relative proportions of these two genres."
http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~aldous/Top_Ten/talk.html
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