h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I've heard it said that, on average during a lifetime, each person will eat 8 spiders while they're asleep.

Thing is how does anybody know that? How can you even begin to research it?

Anyone else got any dodgy stats, they'd like to question or have explained?

BBS

Men apparently think about sex 8 times in an hour(or maybe minute). I wonder how they reached that conclusion.

"Are you thinking about sex?"
"No"
"Are you thinking about sex?"
"No"
"Are you thinking about sex?"
"No"
"Are you thinking about sex?"
"No"
"Are you thinking about sex?"
"No"
"Are you thinking about sex?"
"No"
"Are you thinking about sex?"
"No"
"Are you thinking about sex?"
"Yes"
"Aha, you pervert!"

Well, 47% of statistics are made up....

...including that one

agcB

I used to laugh at the statistic "90% of crime goes undetected". How did they know? Then I found out that the word "detected" was being used in the technical sense, meaning, "the police had found out who done it". So there was some sense to it, even if the figure was made up.

what about 70% (or some figure close that I've forgotten) of chocolate contains at least two insect parts?

Well, that can be found out by doing routine checks. Not that hard.

I just saw an interestin statistic. They had school children push buttered bread off a table about 10.000 times. 62% of the times it landed butter side down. Apparently because the height of the average table means that the bread can´t complete a spin. I wonder if this also happened in ancient times, considering that tables had different heights because people were different heights. Perhaps in mideaval times bread always landed butterside up.

You've all heard of the buttered cat theory, right?

It doesn't mater how many times buttered bread spins. It will ALWAYS land butter-side down.

the.. buttered... cat theory? no.

Strap a slice of buttered toast to the back of a cat. The cat will always land on his feet, but the toast will always land buttered side down. The conflict of these two imperatives causes an improbability field which causes the cat to float above the floor, unable to land. Hey presto, antigravity!

Oh God. Here we go.

It's well known that buttered bread will always land butter-side down if dropped. And it's also a fact that a dropped cat will without fail land on its feet.

So what would happen if you took some buttered bread and sellotaped it butter-side up to a cat's back and then dropped the resulting buttered cat from a height of several feet?

Easy. It would float. The lift provided by the cat's feet would counteract the drag from the buttered bread. Thus, perfect equilibrium is achieved and the cat with hover above the ground.

It's how hovercraft really work. They show you a bunch of fans and say "This is how the hovercraft floats." But when they start the engine (simply done for misdirection) a man under the craft starts buttering bread attached to several waiting moggies. When they cut the engine the same man just eats some of the bread and the cat's ability to float is negated.

There. Feel free to start throwing things at me.

LOL at the buttered cat

Never trust a statistic you didn't fake yourself!
Tube

I just tried to recieve the email I got about that - it was a "theory" someone sent to a science magazine that won an award for its silliness. They proposed to make an antigravity train out of lots of cats with buttered toast strapped to their backs.
Someone wrote in and pointed out however that theremight be a huge lawsuit when the adhesive attaching the cat to the buttered toast failed and the train crashed and they proposed that the actual attraction to the floor was due to the staining effect/difficulty to clean of the material.

Hence the equation - a = SA*CC where a is the attractive force and SA is staining ability and CC is the carpet colour.

Hence a bad stain such as chicken Tikka Massala would be strongly attracted to a carpet and so to create the perpetual motion machine you simply need to smear chicken tikka massala onto the back of the cat hence removing any need for cat-toast adhesive.
In addition, the colour of the carpet is important. The attraction between the carpet and the stain will be reduced if the carpet is not stained visibly should the stain be dropped on it. Thus a red carpet would not serve as a good surface for chicken tikka massala.

The respondent therefor concluded that the best hover-rail would be constructed from a string of cats with chicken tikka massala smeared on their backs hovering over a rail made from cream coloured shagpile carpet.






Going back to the crap statitics theme I saw a pub sign yesterday assuring the reader that
"All our pies are made from 100% pure guiness"

So no pastry or meat then?

I've seen salami which was "Not less than 100% meat. Ingredients: pork, salt, preservative ..."

in aust the minimum requirement for meat pies is 25% meat. I don't even want to know what is considered not meat...

Magrat. (vegetarian for a good reason)

Still, you can't beat those badges that proudly proclaim "I am 1 today", even though it states on the back in tiny letters that "This product is not recommended for children under 3 years old.".

Kiddie-safe paradoxes. Marvellous.

Just imagine being a statistician. A complex area of mathematics which you have studied for years, only for noone to ever believe you. Talk about a thankless task.

I once stumbled across an internet page of jokes for staticians. Whooosh!

Magrat: you have to take into account the pastry, gravy, etc.

Anyway, 43.3% of statistics are meaningless.

38-J

JOTD: If you tell a joke in a forest and nobody laughs, was it a joke?