It is often cited that there are half as many divorces as marriages in the US, so one concludes that average marriages have a 50% chance of ending by divorce. While I was a graduate student, among my peers there were twice as many divorces as marriages, leading us to conclude that average marriages would end twice…
A shoeseller meets a mathematician and complains that he does not know what size shoes to buy. “No problem,” says the mathematician, “there is a simple equation for that,” and he shows him the Gaussian normal distribution. The shoeseller stares some time at het equation and asks, “What is that symbol?” “That is the Greek letter pi.” “What is pi?” “That is the ratio between the circumference and the diameter of a circle.” Upon this the shoeseller cries out: “What does a circle have to do with shoes
There was this statistics student who, when driving his car, would always accelerate hard before coming to any junction, whizz straight over it , then slow down again once he’d got over it. One day, he took a passenger, who was understandably unnerved by his driving style, and asked him why he went so fast over junctions. The statistics student replied, “Well, statistically speaking, you are far more likely to have an accident at a junction, so I just make sure that I spend less time there.”
A new government 10 year survey cost $3,000,000,000 revealed that 3/4 of the people in America make up 75% of the population.
According to recent surveys, 51% of the people are in the majority.
Did you know that 87.166253% of all statistics claim a precision of results that is not justified by the method employed?
80% of all statistics quoted to prove a point are made up on the spot.
According to a recent survey, 33 of the people say they participate in surveys.
Q: What do you call a statistician on drugs?
A: A high flyer.
Q: How many statisticians does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: 1-3, alpha = .05
There is no truth to the allegation that statisticians are mean. They are just your standard normal deviates.
Q: Did you hear about the statistician who invented a device to measure the weight of trees?
A: It’s referred to as the log scale.
Q: Did you hear about the statistician who took the Dale Carnegie course?
A: He improved his confidence from .95 to .99.
Q: Why don’t statisticians like to model new clothes?
A: Lack of fit.
Q: Did you hear about the statistician who was thrown in jail?
A: He now has zero degrees of freedom.
Statisticians must stay away from children’s toys because they regress so easily.
The only time a pie chart is appropriate is at a baker’s convention.
Never show a bar chart at an AA meeting.
Old statisticians never die, they just undergo a transformation.
Q: How do you tell one bathroom full of statisticians from another?
A: Check the p-value.
Q: Did you hear about the statistician who made a career change and became an surgeon specializing in ob/gyn?
A: His specialty was histerectograms.
The most important statistic for car manufacturers is autocorrelation.
Some statisticians don’t drink because they are t-test totalers. Others drink the hard stuff as evidenced by the proliferation of box-and-whiskey plots.
Underwater ship builders are concerned with sub-optimization.
The Lipton Company is big on statistics–especially t-tests
1. They speak only the Greek language.
2. They usually have long threatening names such as Bonferonni, Tchebycheff, Schatzoff, Hotelling, and Godambe. Where are the statisticians with names such as Smith, Brown, or Johnson?
3. They are fond of all snakes and typically own as a pet a large South American snake called an ANOCOVA.
4. For perverse reasons, rather than view a matrix right side up they prefer to invert it.
5. Rather than moonlighting by holding Amway parties they earn a few extra bucks by holding pocket-protector parties.
6. They are frequently seen in their back yards on clear nights gazing through powerful amateur telescopes looking for distant star constellations called ANOVA’s.
7. They are 99% confident that sleep can not be induced in an introductory statistics class by lecturing on z-scores.
8. Their idea of a scenic and exotic trip is traveling three standard deviations above the mean in a normal distribution.
9. They manifest many psychological disorders because as young statisticians many of their statistical hypotheses were rejected.
10. They express a deap-seated fear that society will someday construct tests that will enable everyone to make the same score. Without variation or individual differences the field of statistics has no real function and a statistician becomes a penniless ward of the state
A mathematician and a non-mathematician are sitting in an airport hall waiting for their flight to go. The non has terrible flight panic.
“Hey, don’t worry, it’s just every 10000th flight that crashes.”
“1:10000? So much? Then it surely will be mine!”
“Well, there is an easy way out. Simply take the next plane. It’s much more probable that you go from a crashing to a non-crashing plane than the other way round. So you are already at 1:10000 squared.”
Two statisticians were travelling in an airplane from LA to New York. About an hour into the flight, the pilot announced that they had lost an engine, but don’t worry, there are three left.
However, instead of 5 hours it would take 7 hours to get to New York. A little later, he announced that a second engine failed, and they still had two left, but it would take 10 hours to get to New York.
Somewhat later, the pilot again came on the intercom and announced that a third engine had died. Never fear, he announced, because the plane could fly on a single engine.
However, it would now take 18 hours to get to new York. At this point, one statistician turned to the other and said, “Gee, I hope we don’t lose that last engine, or we’ll be up here forever!”
1. Ten percent of all car thieves are left-handed
2. All polar bears are left-handed
3. If your car is stolen, there’s a 10 percent chance it was taken by a Polar bear
1. 39 percent of unemployed men wear spectacles
2. 80 percent of employed men wear spectacles
3. Work stuffs up your eyesight
1. All dogs are animals
2. All cats are animals
3. Therefore, all dogs are cats
1. A total of 4000 cans are opened around the world every second
2. Ten babies are conceived around the world every second
3. Each time you open a can, you stand a 1 in 400 chance of becoming pregnant
It is proven that the celebration of birthdays is healthy. Statistics show that those people who celebrate the most birthdays become the oldest. — S. den Hartog, Ph D. Thesis Universtity of Groningen
Math problems? Call 1-800-[(10x)(13i)^2]-[sin(xy)/2.362x].
If parallel lines meet at infinity - infinity must be a very noisy place with all those lines crashing together!
Maths Teacher: Now suppose the number of sheep is x…
Student: Yes sir, but what happens if the number of sheep is not x?
Zenophobia: the irrational fear of convergent sequences.
Philosophy is a game with objectives and no rules. Mathematics is a game with rules and no objectives.
If I had only one day left to live, I would live it in my statistics class: it would seem so much longer