关于统计学家的笑话

Statistician Jokes The Biologist, the Statistician, the Mathematician, and the Computer Scientist A 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." The computer scientist: "Oh no! A special case!" The Engineer, the Physicist, the Mathematician, and the Statistician An engineer, a physicist, a mathematician, and a statistician are taken, one at a time, into a room to undergo a psychological test. In the room is a table (upon which is a pad and pencil), a chair, a bucket of water, and a waste basket rigged so that it can be set ablaze from an adjacent room in which the psychologists watch. The engineer is first, and the basket is set ablaze. The engineer immediately jumps up, grabs the bucket of water and dashes the entire thing onto the fire, flooding the entire room and extinguishing the fire. The physicist is next. The basket ignites, the physicist quickly calculates exactly how much water is required to extinguish the flames and pours exactly that amount, neatly extinguishing the flames. The mathematician next. The basket blazes up, the mathematician calculates exactly how much water is required to put out the fire, and then walks out of the room. The statistician is last. The basket is ignited. He grabs the bucket, pours half on one side, half on the other, and announces, "It's out." Page 1 of 8Statistician Jokes 2001-07-16http://info.business.utah.edu/~bebrblf/statjoke.html The Physicist, the Chemist, and the Statistician Three professors (a physicist, a chemist, and a statistician) are called in to see their dean. Just as they arrive the dean is called out of his office, leaving the three professors there. The professors see with alarm that there is a fire in the wastebasket. The physicist says, "I know what to do! We must cool down the materials until their temperature is lower than the ignition temperature and then the fire will go out." The chemist says, "No! No! I know what to do! We must cut off the supply of oxygen so that the fire will go out due to lack of one of the reactants." While the physicist and chemist debate what course to take, they both are alarmed to see the statistician running around the room starting other fires. They both scream, "What are you doing?" To which the statistician replies, "Trying to get an adequate sample size." Definitions Logic is a systematic method for getting the wrong conclusion with confidence. Statistics is a systematic method for getting the wrong conclusion with 95% confidence. (Rafy Marootians, rafy@cairo.anu.edu.au) Mathematics is the systematic misuse of a nomenclature developed for that specific purpose. (Poul- Henning Kamp, phk@data.fls.dk) One-Liners Statistics means never having to say you're certain. "The group was alarmed to find that if you are a labourer, cleaner or dock worker, you are twice as likely to die than a member of the professional classes." (The Sunday Times, August 31, 1980) 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) Page 2 of 8Statistician Jokes 2001-07-16http://info.business.utah.edu/~bebrblf/statjoke.html 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. Statistician: Someone who doesn't have the personality to be an accountant. (Kirk Lindberg, kalindberg@mmm.com) Did you hear about the statistician that couldn't get laid? He decided a simulation was good enough. 80% of all statistics quoted to prove a point are made up on the spot. (Jody Levine, jlevine@rd.hydro.on.ca) Fett's Law: Never replicate a successful experiment. (Prasad, c1prasad@watson.ibm.com) 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 with two-tailed t-tests. Statisticians do it. After all, it's only normal. Statisticians probably do it. (Chris Morton, mortoncp@nextwork.rose-hulman.edu) A Greater Than 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... Page 3 of 8Statistician Jokes 2001-07-16http://info.business.utah.edu/~bebrblf/statjoke.html 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. Page 4 of 8Statistician Jokes 2001-07-16http://info.business.utah.edu/~bebrblf/statjoke.html "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) Page 5 of 8Statistician Jokes 2001-07-16http://info.business.utah.edu/~bebrblf/statjoke.html Hiawatha Designs an Experiment Hiawatha, mighty hunter, He could shoot ten arrows upward, Shoot them with such strength and swiftness That the last had left the bow-string Ere the first to earth descended. This was commonly regarded As a feat of skill and cunning. Several sarcastic spirits Pointed out to him, however, That it might be much more useful If he sometimes hit the target. "Why not shoot a little straighter And employ a smaller sample?" Hiawatha, who at college Majored in applied statistics, Consequently felt entitled To instruct his fellow man In any subject whatsoever, Waxed exceedingly indignant, Talked about the law of errors, Talked about truncated normals, Talked of loss of information, Talked about his lack of bias, Pointed out that (in the long run) Independent observations, Even though they missed the target, Had an average point of impact Very near the spot he aimed at, With the possible exception of a set of measure zero. "This," they said, "was rather doubtful; Anyway it didn't matter. What resulted in the long run: Either he must hit the target Much more often than at present, Or himself would have to pay for All the arrows he had wasted." Hiawatha, in a temper, Quoted parts of R. A. Fisher, Quoted Yates and quoted Finney, Quoted reams of Oscar Kempthorne, Quoted Anderson and Bancroft (practically in extenso) Trying to impress upon them That what actually mattered Was to estimate the error. Several of them admitted: "Such a thing might have its uses; Page 6 of 8Statistician Jokes 2001-07-16http://info.business.utah.edu/~bebrblf/statjoke.html Still," they said, "he would do better If he shot a little straighter." Hiawatha, to convince them, Organized a shooting contest. Laid out in the proper manner Of designs experimental Recommended in the textbooks, Mainly used for tasting tea (but sometimes used in other cases) Used factorial arrangements And the theory of Galois, Got a nicely balanced layout And successfully confounded Second order interactions. All the other tribal marksmen, Ignorant benighted creatures Of experimental setups, Used their time of preparation Putting in a lot of practice Merely shooting at the target. Thus it happened in the contest That their scores were most impressive With one solitary exception. This, I hate to have to say it, Was the score of Hiawatha, Who as usual shot his arrows, Shot them with great strength and swiftness, Managing to be unbiased, Not however with a salvo Managing to hit the target. "There!" they said to Hiawatha, "That is what we all expected." Hiawatha, nothing daunted, Called for pen and called for paper. But analysis of variance Finally produced the figures Showing beyond all peradventure, Everybody else was biased. And the variance components Did not differ from each other's, Or from Hiawatha's. (This last point, it might be mentioned, Would have been much more convincing If he hadn't been compelled to Estimate his own components From experimental plots on Which the values all were missing.) Still they couldn't understand it, So they couldn't raise objections. Page 7 of 8Statistician Jokes 2001-07-16http://info.business.utah.edu/~bebrblf/statjoke.html (Which is what so often happens With analysis of variance.) All the same his fellow tribesmen, Ignorant benighted heathens, Took away his bow and arrows, Said that though my Hiawatha Was a brilliant statistician, He was useless as a bowman. As for variance components Several of the more outspoken Made primeval observations Hurtful of the finer feelings Even of the statistician. In a corner of the forest Sits alone my Hiawatha Permanently cogitating On the normal law of errors. Wondering in idle moments If perhaps increased precision Might perhaps be sometimes better Even at the cost of bias, If one could thereby now and then Register upon a target. [W. E. Mientka, "Professor Leo Moser--Reflections of a Visit," American Mathematical Monthly , Vol. 79, Number 6 (June-July, 1972)] The Ten Commandments of Statistical Inference 1. Thou shalt not hunt statistical inference with a shotgun. 2. Thou shalt not enter the valley of the methods of inference without an experimental design. 3. Thou shalt not make statistical inference in the absence of a model. 4. Thou shalt honor the assumptions of thy model. 5. Thy shalt not adulterate thy model to obtain significant results. 6. Thy shalt not covet thy colleagues' data. 7. Thy shalt not bear false witness against thy control group. 8. Thou shalt not worship the 0.05 significance level. 9. Thy shalt not apply large sample approximation in vain. 10. Thou shalt not infer causal relationships from statistical significance. This material was extracted from "Science Jokes," posted to rec.humor, sci.math, and a few other Usenet news groups by Joachim Verhagen (verhagen@fys.ruu.nl). Keith M. Gregg (keithg@playfair.stanford.edu) Last modified January 26, 1996 Page 8 of 8Statistician Jokes 2001-07-16http://info.business.utah.edu/~bebrblf/statjoke.html