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

There's a 50% chance.

Statistics simply can't be applied to 'opinion' polls.

One out of ten times with an error variance of 3-6%
99 out of 100 times - depending on the skew of those
willing to stop and reply to the pollster/interviewer.
Believe me, I've done some serious polling surveys for
a major PR firm and the number of people willing to stop
and give an opinion is a very small percentage - which
means 97% of people are never polled and the 3% who do
have some personal (bias) reasons for participating.

~jwf~

pish to maths being truth, science or anything other than witchcraft. And if you don't believe me, I give you "i" numbers.

If you want to understand i (the square root of minus one) then think of it like this.

Some things are reversible. If you look at yourself in a mirror you look back to front. If you look at yourself in two mirrors then you look normal again.

So looking in the mirror squared equals one.

i (the square root of minus one) is simply a type of mirror you can look in, where if you used two of them you would appear back to front.

yers...

That took a moment or two, Icy

With regard maths the most interesting but never ending debate is whether it was invented or discovered. Since maths essentially consists of a set of definitions acting on abstract quantities it doesn't necessarily have any bearing on reality - except that it is found that it does (to a certain extent).

It arises from the phenomenon that life can at times be predictable.

If everything were entirely random, maths wouldn't exist. Neither would science for that matter, the rules of which are logical or mathematical.

Maths is the language of physics.

Physics is the language of chemistry
Chemistry is the language of biology
And from there it is but a small step to income tax.

XKCD does it better

http://xkcd.com/435/

My maths lecturer at university claimed to have had some T-shirts printed that said "Maths is truth, but we can still lie together".

Following Church-Turing, whether Mathematics is Truth may be undecidable of course.

XKCD: Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation .

There used to be a book called "How to lie with statistics." After I read that, I became suspicious of most statistical findings.

That Appears to be a Richard Feynman quote, unless of course they are lying.
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/264149-physics-is-to-math-what-sex-is-to-masturbation

Feynman was a scientist, so I assume he was telling the truth .