Our world is awash in information, more plentiful than the grains of sand in these dunes. Hoping to understand the world, statisticians play in the sand, our data. We collect and inspect it. We describe it and look for patterns. We use it to create models. We hope that our models, like the castle, are useful images of the real world. Using tools based on the perfect curves of mathematics, we compare our models to that reality. Seeing where the models work -- and more often, where they fail -- we discover truths about our world. - p. [xxi].