GCSE Statistics
GCSE Statistics Home Coursework Exam Preparation
Some Statistics jokes!
From http://www.business.utah.edu/~bebrblf/statjoke.html
Statisticians do it
Statisticians do it continuously but discretely.Statisticians do it when it counts.
Statisticians do it with 95% confidence.
Statisticians do it with large numbers.
Statisticians do it with only a 5% chance of being rejected.
Statisticians do it. After all, it's only normal.
Statisticians probably do it.
(Contributed by Chris Morton, mortoncp@nextwork.rose-hulman.edu)
From http://eval1.crc.uiuc.edu/edpsy390/statjokes.html
Q: Why do people decide to become statisticians?
A: They find accounting too exciting.
Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they
conceal is vital.
- Aaron Levenstein
"Do you hear about the statistician who drowned in a lake averaging only 2 inches in depth?"
How about an old, old, stat joke. It's about the statistician's view of a person with one foot embedded in a bucket of ice and the other foot on a hot stove...on the average, he's comfortable!
One day there was a fire in a wastebasket in the dean's office and in rushed a physicist, a chemist, and a statistician. The physicist immediately starts to work on how much energy would have to be removed from the fire to stop the combustion. The chemist works on which regent would have to be added to the fire to prevent oxidation. While they are doing this, the statistician is setting fires to all the other wastebaskets in the office. "What are you doing?" they demanded.
"Well to solve the problem, obviously you need a large sample size" the statistician replies.
"100,000 lemmings can't be wrong."
Statistician -- someone who insists on being certain about uncertainty.
Did you hear about ...
 | the statistician who was a real mean mathematician?
| the two binomial random variables who talked very quietly because they
were discrete?
| |
A politician travelling to Scotland looked out of the train window and saw a
number of black sheep. "That's interesting", he said, "all
Scottish sheep are black". "No, no", warned his agent.
"Don't make positive statements like that. Best just say 'Some Scottish
sheep are black'. Isn't that right, Jim?"
Jim, a statistician, replied "Well, on the evidence so far, the only thing
you can say is 'Some Scottish sheep are black - on one side".
A statistician is a person whose lifetime ambition is to be wrong 5% of the time.
I read that there's about 1 chance in 1000 that someone will board an airplane carrying a bomb. So I started carrying a bomb with me on every flight I take; I figure the odds against two people having bombs are astronomical.
Following a flaming snowmobile crash, one statistician asked the other if he was OK. The second said "well, my hair's on fire and my toes are frostbitten, but overall I feel pretty good."
And from http://www.business.utah.edu/~bebrblf/statjoke.htmlA biologist, a statistician, a mathematician, and a computer scientist are on a photo-safari in Africa. They drive out into the savannah in their jeep, stop, and scour the horizon with their binoculars.
The biologist: "Look! There's a herd of zebras! And there, in the middle: a white zebra! It's fantastic! There are white zebras! We'll be famous!"
The statistician: "It's not significant. We only know there's one white zebra."
The mathematician: "Actually, we know there exists a zebra which is white on one side."
Statistics means never having to say you're certain.
Statistics is the art of never having to say you're wrong.
Variance is what any two statisticians are at. (C. J. Bradfield, ph2008@mail.bris.ac.uk)
97.3% of all statistics are made up.
It's like the tale of the roadside merchant who was asked to explain how he could sell rabbit sandwiches so cheap. "Well," he explained, "I have to put some horse-meat in too. But I mix them 50:50. One horse, one rabbit." (Darrel Huff, How to Lie with Statistics)
Are statisticians normal?
Smoking is a leading cause of statistics. [Jascha Franklin-Hodge's (joeshmoe@world.std.com) List of Taglines]
43% of all statistics are worthless. [Jascha Franklin-Hodge's (joeshmoe@world.std.com) List of Taglines]
"There are lies, damned lies, and statistics." (Mark Twain)
3 out of 4 Americans make up 75% of the population. [Jascha Franklin-Hodge's (joeshmoe@world.std.com) List of Taglines]
Death is 99 per cent fatal to laboratory rats. [Jascha Franklin-Hodge's (joeshmoe@world.std.com) List of Taglines]
A statistician is a person who draws a mathematically precise line from an unwarranted assumption to a foregone conclusion.
A statistician can have his head in an oven and his feet in ice, and he will say that on the average he feels fine.
80% of all statistics quoted to prove a point are made up on the spot. (Jody Levine, jlevine@rd.hydro.on.ca)
The Average Number of Legs?
The great majority of people have more than the average number of legs. Amongst the 57 million people in Britain there are probably 5,000 people who have only one leg. Therefore the average number of legs is(5000 x 1 + 56,995,000 x 2)/57,000,000 = 1.9999123.Since most people have two legs...
Quotes (Excerpted from "Quotes, Damned Quotes" by John Bibby.)
Paul Harvey News, 1979
If there is a 50-50 chance that something can go wrong, then 9 times out of ten it will.
K.A.C. Manderville, The Undoing of Lamia Gurdleneck
"You haven't told me yet," said Lady Nuttal, "what it is your fiance does for a living."
"He's a statistician," replied Lamia, with an annoying sense of being on the defensive.
Lady Nuttal was obviously taken aback. It had not occurred to her that statisticians entered into normal social relationships. The species, she would have surmised, was perpetuated in some collateral manner, like mules.
"But Aunt Sara, it's a very interesting profession," said Lamia warmly.
"I don't doubt it," said her aunt, who obviously doubted it very much. "To express anything important in mere figures is so plainly impossible that there must be endless scope for well-paid advice on the how to do it. But don't you think that life with a statistician would be rather, shall we say, humdrum?"
Lamia was silent. She felt reluctant to discuss the surprising depth of emotional possibility which she had discovered below Edward's numerical veneer.
"It's not the figures themselves," she said finally. "It's what you do with them that matters."
The Man who Counts the Number of people at Public Gatherings
You've probably seen his headlines, "Two million flock to see Pope", "200 arrested as police find ounce of cannabis", "Britain $3 billion in debt." You probably wondered who was responsible for producing such well rounded-up figures. What you didn't know was that it was all the work of one man, Rounder-Up to the media, John Wheeler. But how is he able to go on turning out such spot-on statistics? How can he be so accurate all the time?
"We can't," admits Wheeler blithely. "Frankly, after the first million we stop counting, and round it up to the next million. I don't know if you've ever counted a papal flock, but, not only do they look a bit the same, they also don't keep still, what with all the bowing and crossing themselves."
"The only way you could do it accurately is by taking an aerial photograph of the crowd and handing it to the computer to work out. But then you'd get a headline saying, '1,678,163 [sic] flock to see Pope, not including 35,467 who couldn't see him,' and, believe me, nobody wants that sort of headline."
The art of big figures, avers Wheeler, lies in psychology, not statistics. The public like a figure it can admire. It likes millionaires, and million-sellers, and centuries at cricket, so Wheeler's international agency gives them the figures it wants, which involves not only rounding up but rounding down.
"In the old days people used to deal with crowds on the Isle of Wight principle--you know, they'd say that every day the population of the world increased by the number of people who could stand upright on the Isle of Wight, or the rain-forests were being decreased by an area the size of Rutland. This meant nothing. Most people had never been to the Isle of Wight for a start, and even if they had, they only had a vision of lots of Chinese standing in the grounds of the Cowes Yacht Club. And the Rutland comparison was so useless that they were driven to abolish Rutland to get rid of it.
"No, what people want is a few good millions. A hundred million, if possible. One of our inventions was street value, for instance. In the old days they used to say that police had discovered drugs in a quantity large enough to get all of Rutland stoned for a fortnight. *We* started saying that the drugs had a street value of $10 million. Absolutely meaningless, but people understand it better."
Sometimes they do get the figures spot on. "250,000 flock to see Royal two," was one of his recent headlines, and although the 250,000 was a rounded-up figure, the two was quite correct. In his palatial office he sits surrounded by relics of past headlines--a million-year-old fossil, a $500,000 Manet, a photograph of the Sultan of Brunei's $10,000,000 house--but pride of place goes to a pair of shoes framed on the wall.
"Why the shoes? Because they cost me $39.99. They serve as a reminder of mankind's other great urge, to have stupid odd figures. Strange, isn't it? They want mass demos of exactly half a million, but they also want their gramophone records to go round at thirty-three-and-a-third, forty-five and seventy-eight rpm. We have stayed in business by remembering that below a certain level people want oddity. They don't want a rocket costing $299 million and 99p, and they don't want a radio costing exactly $50."
How does he explain the times when the figures clash--when, for example, the organisers of a demo claim 250,000 but the police put it nearer 100,000?
"We provide both sets of figures; the figures the organisers want, and the figures the police want. The public believe both. If we gave the true figure, about 167,890, nobody would believe it because it doesn't sound believable."
John Wheeler's name has never become well-known, as he is a shy figure, but his firm has an annual turnover of $3 million and his eye for the right figure has made him a rich man. His greatest pleasure, however, comes from the people he meets in the counting game.
"Exactly two billion, to be precise."
(Miles Kington, writing in The Observer, November 3, 1986)
Final Exam
A statistics major was completely hung over the day of his final exam. It was a true/false test, so he decided to flip a coin for the answers. The statistics professor watched the student the entire two hours as he was flipping the coin... writing the answer... flipping the coin... writing the answer. At the end of the two hours, everyone else had left the final except for the one student. The professor walks up to his desk and interrupts the student, saying, "Listen, I have seen that you did not study for this statistics test, you didn't even open the exam. If you are just flipping a coin for your answer, what is taking you so long?"
The student replies bitterly (as he is still flipping the coin), "Shhh! I am checking my answers!"
(Sunita Saini, ez017842@peseta.ucdavis.edu)
