The funny thing is I've never used absolute deviation before, so I'm slightly confused by absolute deviation right now as I wrap my head around what it means re

The funny thing is I've never used absolute deviation before, so I'm slightly confused by absolute deviation right now as I wrap my head around what it means relative to sigma (which I have used, lightly, for years) and why anyone would want to use it instead... edit: apparently MAD can refer to either "mean absolute deviation" or "median absolute deviation". Yup, this sure isn't going to confuse anybody.