Some statistical quotes (Most compiled by Ewart Shaw at Warwick, Chuck Rohde and various internet sites)

Transcription

1 Some statistical quotes (Most compiled by Ewart Shaw at Warwick, Chuck Rohde and various internet sites)

2 Academics I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top - Anonymous English Professor, Ohio University

3 Yes, the lectures are optional. Graduation is also optional. - Bob Bickford

4 Research Basic research is like shooting an arrow in the air and, where it lands, painting a target. - Homer Adkins Nature 312:212 (1984)

5 I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it the right way, did not become still more complicated - Paul Anderson New Scientist, 25Sept1969

6 We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough. - Niels Henrik David Bohr

7 Torture numbers, and they ll confess to anything. - Gregg Easterbrook

8 Despite this system, anyone who reads journals widely and critically is forced to realize that there are scarcely any bars to eventual publication. There seems to be no study too fragmented, no hypothesis too trivial, no literature too biased or too egotistical, no design too warped, no methodology too bungled, no presentation of results too inaccurate, too obscure, too contradictory, no analysis too self serving, no argument too trifling or too unjustified, and no grammar and syntax too offensive for a paper to end up in print. The function of peer review, then, may be to help decide not whether but where papers are published. - Drummond Remmie

9 As we know there are known knowns. These are things that we know that we know. There are also known unkowns. That is to say, there are some things that we know that we don t know. But there are also unknown unkowns, the ones we don t know we don t know. - Donald Rumsfeld

10 Get your facts straight first and then you can distort em as much as you please - Mark Twain

11 Mathematics The creator of the universe works in mysterious ways. But he uses a base ten counting system and likes round numbers - Scott Adams

12 Why are our days numbered and not, say, lettered? - Woody Allen

13 Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman, who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - Robert Heinlein ( )

14 Statistics Old Statisticians never die they just get broken down by age and sex -?

15 According to the most trustworthy statistics the number of adult Dullards in the United States is but little short of thirty millions, including the statisticians. - Ambrose Gwinett Bierce The Devils Dictionary (1911)

16 He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts for support rather than illumination. - Andrew Lang

17 Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital. - Aaron Levenstein

18 79.48% of all statistics are made up on the spot. - John Allen Paulos

19 Satan delights equally in statistics and in quoting scripture... H.G. Wells, The Undying Fire

20 The average human has one breast and one testicle. - Des McHale

21 Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than the exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise. - John Wilder Tukey Ann. Math. Stat. 33 (1962)

22 It is commonly believed that anyone who tabulates numbers is a statistician. This is like believing that anyone who owns a scalpel is a surgeon. - R Hooke How to Tell the Liars from the Statisticians

23 To call in the statistician after the experiment is done may be no more than asking him to perform a postmortem examination: he may be able to say what the experiment died of. - Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher Address to Indian Statistical Congress (1938?)

24 Statistical Thinking will be one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write. - H.G. Wells

25 Public Health

26 The first law of public health is that there will always be a leading cause of death - H.L. Mencken

27 Certain old men prefer to rise at dawn, taking a cold bath and a long walk with an empty stomach and otherwise mortifying the flesh. They then point with pride to these practices as the cause of their sturdy health and ripe years; the truth being that they are hearty and old, not because of their habits, but in spite of them. The reason we find only robust persons doing this thing is that it has killed all the others who have tried it. - Ambrose Gwinett Bierce The Devils Dictionary (1911)

28 The government are very keen on amassing statistics. They collect them, add them, raise them to the nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But you must never forget that every one of these figures comes in the first instance from the village watchman, who just puts down what he damn pleases. - Anonymous English Judge (Quoted by Sir Josiah Stamp in Some Economic Matters in Modern Life (1929)

29 Statistics show that of those who contract the habit of eating, very few survive. - William Wallace Irwin

30 It is now proved beyond doubt that smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics. - Fletcher Knebel in Readers Digest, Dec. 1961

31 Every minute dies a man, / Every minute one is born ; I need hardly point out to you that this calculation would tend to keep the sum total of the world s population in a state of perpetual equipoise, whereas it is a well-known fact that the said sum total is constantly on the increase. I would therefore take the liberty of suggesting that in the next edition of your excellent poem the erroneous calculation to which I refer should be corrected as follows: Every moment dies a man / And one and a sixteenth is born. I may add that the exact figures are 1.067, but something must, of course, be conceded to the laws of metre. - Charles Babbage Unpublished letter to Alfred, Lord Tennyson (c.18??)

32 The first lesson that you must learn is, when I call for statistics about the rate of infant mortality, what I want is proof that fewer babies died when I was Prime Minister than when anyone else was Prime Minister. That is a political statistic.- Winston Churchill British Prime Minister, orator and writer ( )

33 Prediction There are many methods for predicting the future. For example, you can read horoscopes, tea leaves, tarot cards, or crystal balls. Collectively, these methods are known as nutty methods -Scott Adams

34 I ve gone to hundreds of fortune-tellers parlors, and have been told thousands of things, but nobody ever told me I was a policewoman getting ready to arrest her? - Anonymous New York City Detective

35 Prediction is very difficult, especially of the future. - Niels Henrik David Bohr

36 And finally Data is a lot like humans. It is born. Matures. Gets married to other data, divorced. Gets old. One thing it doesn t do is die. It has to be killed. - Arthur Miller