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

Got any? that are interesting and maybe can be used one day in something.

88.4% of statistics are made up on the spot, or so someone once said, Vic Reeves or the mortimer guy I think!

99% of stats are used out of context makeing them completely useless.

peace.

personally i fint eh h2g2 info page stats quite interesting, and i use them in normal conversation.....but i dont think that was what you meant

FABT

Only 12% of stats don't end with a punctuation mark

This looks interesting. *REVIVE*

To get things restarted, I heard a while back that 95% of murders in this country are solved.

Any statistic can be quoted in such a way as to meet the needs of the person using it. For example, some years ago a company selling home security systems stated in its advertising that a UK home is broken into every three minutes. Given the number of homes in the UK at that time, the figures could be quoted as "Your home will be broken into once every 20 years, on average." That wouldn't sell many security systems, though.

Regarding how often a house will be broken into, my in-laws lived in their house for nearly 50 years and it was never broken into. My parents lived in their home for nearly 30 years and it was never broken into. Our first home was broken into within a year of us moving in. We lived there for another 17 years and had no further problems. It all depends on the crime statistics for the area where you live. We obviously picked 'nice' areas with little crime.

Fuzzy logic is derived from fuzzy set theory dealing with reasoning that is approximate rather than precisely deduced from classical predicate logic. It can be thought of as the application of fuzzy set theory dealing with well thought out real world expert values
for a complex problem.

Degrees of truth are confused with probabilities, however they are distinct conceptually, fuzzy truth represents membership in vaguely defined sets, not likelihood of some event or condition.

For example, if a 100ml glass contains 30mls of water, then for the two datasets, empty and full, one might define the glass as being 70ml empty and 30ml full. Note the conception of emptiness would be subjective and thus would be dependent on the observer.

Another observer might equally well design a membership function where the glass would be considered full for all values above 50%. A probabilistic setting would first define a scalar variable for the fullness of the glass, and second, conditional distributions describing the probability and that someone would call the glass full given a specific fullness level.

Note that the conditioning can be achieved by having a specific observer that randomly selects a label for the glass, a distribution over deterministic observers, or both.

While fuzzy logic avoids talking about randomness in this context, this simplification at the same time obscures what exactly is meant by the statement 'the glass is 30ml full'.

Also

The CfA2 Great Wall is approximately 739,062,500,000,000,000 times longer than the Great Wall of China. Granted the Great Wall of China does'nt come into conversation much however if some egghead is mouthing off about it, you can quickly come in and put there ego in perspective.

Excuse my ignorance, but what's "CfA2"?

Well the Centre of Astrophysics (CfA) discovered it so they stuck there abreviated name in front of the title. Its so they don't refer to it with the Sloan Great Wall discovered later which is three times longer than the CfA2 Great Wall.

Ah! An astronomical feature. Thanks for the explanation.

With the above cautionary notes in mind, let's get back to the OT: After the UEFA Cup Final, I heard a pundit point out that Glasgow Rangers have a combined wage bill smaller than that of Derby County...

"Statistician Blues" by Todd Snider:

http://www.cowboylyrics.com/tabs/snider-todd/statistician-blues-10809.html