But paleontologists have used some clever statistics to adjust for those inconsistencies, and the latest diversity curve makes it look like there have been eight major mass extinctions rather than five.

但古生物学家使用一些聪明的统法校正误差，最新的物种线看曾有八次大灭绝，而非五次。

If you want to make it rigorous you have  to be explicit about the error between these approximations and the true thing we care  about, the area under this curve.

如果你想让它变得严格，你必须明确这些近值与我们关心的真实事物（这条线下的面积）之间的误差。

In statistics, pi is used in the equation to calculate the area under a normal distribution curve; which comes in handy for figuring out distributions of standardized test scores, financial models, or margins of error in scientific results.

在统学中，π 可代入等式中用算正态线下的面积；在算标准化考试数、财务模型或科学结果的误差范围时都会用到。

We theoretically predicted and experimentally verified that we could bend these bad power laws down to much better exponentials, where adding a few more data points could reduce your error, rather than ten-xing the amount of data.

我们通过理论预测并实验验证了， 能够将这些不良的幂律线弯至更优的指数线，在此情况下， 增加少量数据点即可减少误差，而非成倍增加数据量。