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Useless Statistical Almanach
I plan to make this a regular feature of the site (probably once a week), if you don’t mind, and I hope that some of you will contribute with their own examples.
The idea is to use (simple) statistics in a way rarely seen elsewhere to put things in a different perspective and gain insights on our world.
So, here we go:
Average number of deaths in the USA, per day: 7,000
(pop. 288M, death rate 8.3/1000/year)
Average number of deaths in Indonesia, per day: 4,500
(pop. 217M, death rate 7.3/1000/year)
Deaths on 9/11: 3,000, i.e. a 40% increase on the US daily average
Deaths from the Tsunami in Insonesia: 100,000, i.e. more than 20 times the daily norm.
In a graph of actual daily deaths, 9/11 would not really stand out that much, as such "unusual" daily death rates happen several times a year for purely statistical reasons (especially as you consider that you have 20% more deaths in the winter than in the summer).
And yet, which event has the biggest political consequences worlwide? Are the causes of an event (human vs nature) more important than its actual consequences? Are such physical, visible results less important than the (human, political) interpretation that is made of them? Is this right?
And do you think that the tsunami is so noticeable that it will actually have some geopolitical ramifications and make this example moot?
Hey guys, this will be a weekly (at least) feature, so don”t waste all your nice statistics in one go today…
b – AIDS is certainly worth a thread of its own. It’s planned, unless you preempt me! (Yes, I have long term plans here – a future thread will be called “Pre-emptive Compulsive Blogging Disorder Prevention Programme Related Activities”, just so you know)
CP – see the inserted comments in your stats:
• 0.3 per cent of all road accidents in Canada involve a moose.
That sounds low…
• 13 people a year are killed by vending machines falling on them.
How many of them in the US? Is such a small number statistically significant?
• 4 per cent of the U.S. population are vegetarians.
• 40 per cent of cat and dog owners carry pictures of their pets in their wallets.
• 40 per cent of women have hurled footwear at a man.
• 50 per cent of bank robberies take place on Fridays.
Now that’s the first one where you say “I would never have guessed it but it does make some sort of sense!”
• 70 per cent of all boats sold are used in fishing.
I doubt this one very much.
• 90 per cent of women who walk into a department store immediately turn to the right.
???
• A car is stolen every 30 seconds in the U.S.
That’s the kind of meaningless numbers you hear too much in the media. You have 8,700 hours per year, and 3,132,000 seconds per year, which makes any number bigger than a few hundred thousand significant in terms of units per second per per minute, and thus useless and harmless.
• About 200 babies are born worldwide every minute.
Same comment…
• Approximately 97.3978271128 per cent of all statistics are made up.
This is actually a very important point. Numbers convey information. How much information depends (among others) on how many “useful” digits there are (“chiffres significatifs”, I am sorry but I do not know the exact English equivalent, which is a pity here); Many digits convey “very precise information” thus trustworthy, scientific, etc… Journalists seem to lack any kind of math training of any kind and have trouble understanding the numerical information they use. Thus “approximately 1 billion dollars” becomes “approximately 789.567 million euros”, which is absolutely meaningless. “Approx 1 b$” probably means between 800 and 1,200 million, or sometimes even between 500 and 2,000. It should thus be translated as “approx. 800 million euros” to convey the same meaning, but that seems beyond the intellectual capacities of most journalists. I understand that in France, where journalists are those that were bad in maths in school and thus could not get into the elite “Grandes Ecoles” (engineering and business schools) and ended up studying litterature and other useless stuff in an overcrowded and underfunded university, but in Anglo-Saxony?? (Am I being provocative. 97.8434234% chances that I indeed am)
• Assuming Rudolph was in front, there are 40,320 ways to rearrange the other eight reindeer.
This is exactly correct.
• August is the month when most babies are born.
This is an interesting kind of statistic. It sounds strange, and vaguely disquieting, until you realise that there HAS to be a month of the year with the most births and thus the information is a lot less amazing than it sounds. People have more sex in December? Yep, sounds possible…
• The average 4-year-old asks over 400 questions a day.
I seriously doubt this one. Remember, there are only 1,440 minutes in a day, s/he sleeps through half of that, eats, screams, runs through anorher good portion… One question a minute? No way. Use your commons sense to debunk apparently authoritative statistics…
• The average adult spends about 12 minutes in the shower per day.
• The average person keeps old magazines for 29 weeks before they throw them out.
That sounds like an abuse of the difference between “average” and “median”. I’ll go into that in more detail in a future post, but this is a typical “technically true but meaningless statistic” as far as I can tell
• The average person speaks about 31,500 words per day.
20 words per minute, every single minute, including at night?
• The average person spends about 2 years on the phone in a lifetime.
That means about 2-3% of your time (maybe less if nights are conveniently excluded from your “lifetime”), which means 30-45 minutes per day. That actually sounds low if you do my job…
• The average person will spend two weeks over their lifetime waiting for the traffic lights to change.
Again, meaningless comparison. 2 weeks over 80 years is 1/4,000th, or 20 seconds per day. Boo-hoo!
• Children between the ages of two and seven, on average, colour for 28 minutes every day.
Sounds possible to me (at least for girls)
• Couples who marry in January, February and March tend to have the highest divorce rates.
(see my comment above about statistics where something has to happen on a list, and you make it sound like it is amazing that it happened to “that” item of the list)
• Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada has the largest number of bars per capita than anywhere else in the world.
Again there has to be one place for which this is true.
• In Calcutta, 79 per cent of the population live in one-room houses.
• It would take more than 150 years to drive a car to the sun.
150 million kilometers. 1 million kilometers per year; 8,700 hours per year. 116 kph (72 mph) sounds about right for a car travelling in the solar system…
• The longest kiss on record lasted 130 hours and two minutes.
Guiness book of record – specific statistc.
• Married men tip better than unmarried men.
Married men probably have more money than unmarried ones, overall, taking into account their average age…
• Men are 1.6 times more likely to undergo by-pass heart surgery than women.
• The most hazardous season: summer.
Depends on what “hazardous” means. there are definitely more deaths in winter.
• Odds of being killed by a dog: one in 700,000.
• Odds of being killed by a tornado: one in 2,000,000.
• Odds of being killed by falling out of bed: one in 2,000,000.
• Odds of being killed in a car crash: one in 5,000.
• Odds of being murdered: one in 20,000.
• Odds of dying in the bathtub: one in 1,000,000.
• Qatar has the lowest death rate in the world at 1.6 deaths for every 1,000 persons.
They have the youngest population.
• The record for the world’s worst driver is shared by (1) a 75-year old man who received 10 traffic tickets, drove on the wrong side of the road 4 times, committed 4 hit-and-run offences and caused 6 accidents, all within 20 minutes on 15 Oct 1966; and (2) a 62-year-old woman who failed her driving test 40 times before passing it in August 1970 (by that time she had spent over $1,000 in lessons and could no longer afford to buy a car).
• The safest age of life is 10 years old.
No driving, no drinking and no drowning…
• Sweden has the least number of murders annually.
This is obviously false on an absolute basis (the Vatican, another country, certainly has less), but may be true on a per capita basis. Again (i) one country has to lead that particular contest and (ii) make sure that you talk about somethin precise and comparable (per capita purder rate in a given year)
• Women shoplift more than men – the statistics are four to one.
How about adjusting to the time spent shopping?
• You are more likely to get attacked by a cow than a shark.
what do you mean by “attacked”? Getting close to you quickly?
Posted by: Jérôme | Jan 5 2005 0:20 utc | 17
Well, if there wasn’t any quake at all, we would have known it from the first minute, they have a pretty obvious signatures and the sucker left its fingerprints in every seismological station around the world (well, unless Munich University can be bought). For instance, here’s a fellow who caught a previous quake in Sumatra, from the other end of the world. A mere nuke would’ve been found out pretty easily and missiles would’ve begin flying last week, I fear. In fact, the locals felt it in Sumatra – it was close enough to already hit Aceh quite hard. And there are countless replicas up to 7 Richter that have been recorded since then. They also found out (by GPS, I think) that some islands moved by several metres at once, along the faultline.
Hmmm, except it doesn’t happen every 50.000 years. I mean, there was a biggest quake in the 1960s; you can roughly assume that there’s one like that every few decades, and if it’s in the sea, there’s high chance there’ll be a tsunami. The trick is that half the time it happens in barely populated areas, or what used to be so (basically, in the last 10 years, it’s the only massively deadly 8+ earthquake, most of the time it’s 6+ or 7+ happening in seismic areas but populated areas where massive growth of population led to substandard constructions.
So, well, a nuke could move some water, maybe cause some big tidal wave, but you’d probably need one like 100 MT to cause such a big tsunami, and since the earthquake has been felt and recorded, and the faultline is now pretty active with replicas, the only use of a nuke would be as a trigger. And I frankly don’t know if you can trigger such a monster with a nuke (sure, I saw that Bond movie, A view to a kill, and wasn’t there something similar in Superman too?).
So, I won’t say I’m entirely sure it’s natural, but I’d like to read some specific explanations about triggering quakes with nukes. And then, more to the point, if it was triggered by man,this sucker was gonna happen in the next 20 years at the longest without that, and it would just have been bigger, like 9.3, if it happened in 2012. So, to sum it up, I just would like to first actually know if it is possible to trigger, how they managed to spot one of the worst places at the moment, and what’s the point in forcing what will happen pretty soon. Of course, I realise that an insane mind bent on Armageddon may have some interest in triggering massive earthquakes throughout the world, causing mayhem on a grand scale; but this should also ensure a pretty quake-free world for several decades.
Jérôme:
Median vs Average, of course. Well, that’s one of the trickies part for people to understand, and the easiest one to cheat them with stats (think: average yearly income vs median yearly income).
Phone stats: if it’s a global stat, not a Western one, it may be correct.
Cows: The trick is that they have a very very bad sight. I remember once, when in the countryside, a bunch of cows that ended up grazing all around the car. Well, one of these silly animals was less than 2 yeards from the car, quietly grazing, when it suddenly noticed that there was something new, a massive unexpected and unknown object lying there in front of her, she jumped, was pretty upset for a minute, then went on grazing again. I suppose that in some cases, people get attacked by cows simply because most of the time these mammals notice people just when they pass beside them.
Speaking of shark, it’s also my suspicion that there’s an unknown amount of tsunami casualties that ended up as shark snack and will be “missing” for the rest of eternity, without any body to confirm they’re dead.
Posted by: Clueless Joe | Jan 5 2005 0:54 utc | 18
I am not so sure about the argument being settled, rapt. The BBC lists the following 9+ mag earthquakes in the last 50 years as follows:
1960 – Chile, 9.5 magnitude
1964 – Alaska, 9.2
1957 – Alaska, 9.1
1952 – Russia, 9.0
2004 – Indonesia, 9.0
I heard on NPR that one Indonesian island had a saying that roughly translated says “If the tide go way out, run for the mountains.” (This is what we were taught when I lived in Hawaii. My school was just inside the tsunami zone.) Apparently this island has a living memory of a terrible tsunami and knew what to do; which contrasts sharply with its neighbors on other islands and coast, some of whom went down to collect standed fish or climb on newly exposed rocks.
Conchita and I were emailing about the possiblity of a human cause, and I am extremely sceptical that it would be possible for humanity to intentionally (or otherwise) trigger an earthquake. It is said that the earthquake had the explosive force of 1 million Hiroshima power bombs. By comparison:
“The world’s most powerful hydrogen bomb was detonated on the 30th of October 1961 [over Novaya Zemlya]. The bomb had an explosive force of 58 megatons, or almost 6,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. The bomb was dropped by an aircraft, and detonated 365 metres (1,200 feet) above the surface. The shock wave produced by this bomb was so powerful, it went thrice around the earth. The mushroom cloud extended almost 60 kilometres into the atmosphere.”
And most modern nukes are have a yeild of a megaton or less.
That said, Conchita pointed out to me that in April 1997 then Sec. of Defense Bill Cohen said something rather scary in an interview at the University of Georgia. This is what she sent me by way of TheMemoryHole.org
Extracted from
http://thememoryhole.org/mil/cohen-ecoweapons.htm
US Secretary of Defense Reveals Earthquake
and Volcano Weapons
>>> This one might seem beyond belief, but we have it from none other than a sitting Secretary of Defense. In April 1997, then-Defense Secretary William
Cohen was speaking at a terrorism conference at the University of Georgia. After some introductory remarks about the conference, Cohen takes questions from the media in attendance. A reporter asks a question based on the fake anthrax letters that had recently been sent to B’nai Brith. Cohen gives a strange answer, using the occasion to mention the exotic weapons being developed by terrorists (as well as–one would assume–governments).
Here’s the exchange, taken verbatim from the transcript posted on the Defense Department’s Website:
Q: “Let me ask you specifically about last week’s scare here in Washington,
and what we might have learned from how prepared we are to deal with that
(inaudible), at B’nai Brith.”
A: “Well, it points out the nature of the threat. It turned out to be a false
threat under the circumstances. But as we’ve learned in the intelligence
community, we had something called — and we have James Woolsey here to perhaps even address this question about phantom moles. The mere fear that there is a mole within an agency can set off a chain reaction and a hunt for that particular mole which can paralyze the agency for weeks and months and years even, in a search. The same thing is true about just the false scare of a threat of using some kind of a chemical weapon or a biological one. There are some reports, for example, that some countries have been trying to construct something like an Ebola Virus, and that would be a very dangerous phenomenon, to say the least. Alvin Toeffler has written about this in terms of some scientists in their laboratories trying to devise certain types of pathogens that would be ethnic specific so that they could just eliminate certain ethnic groups and races; and others are designing some sort of engineering, some sort of insects that can destroy specific crops. Others are engaging even in an eco- type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves.
So there are plenty of ingenious minds out there that are at work finding
ways in which they can wreak terror upon other nations. It’s real, and that’s the reason why we have to intensify our efforts, and that’s why this is so
important.”
This was/is my response:
I just recently read the Cohen statement in question online somewhere. I think it was before the earth quake even. Anyway, I find it hard to believe that anything short of a nuclear explosion, and even then I am skeptical anything human made could create a magnetic force strong enough to set off an earthquake much less do so accurately, that is in a targeted manner. But I am no scientist and the last four years have made me rather paranoid when it comes to national governments and the Bush/Neocon/PNAC cabal in particular. I will post Cohen’s comments on Moon. I for one would be glad to hear other Mooner’s opinions on the subject. One thing I will say, after the earthquake/tsunami casualty numbers started coming in I remembered the huge earthquake that destroyed Bam (ironic name) in Iran on Dec. 26, 2003. I wanted to compare the death tolls but then I noticed that both events were exactly one year, to the day, apart. That set off the Twilight Zone theme in my head. They say two times is a coincidence, three times is not. If a huge earthquake happens off the coast of San Francisco on Dec. 26 this year, I will shit.
Posted by: stoy | Jan 6 2005 5:59 utc | 33
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