Encyclopedia of Humor

There was this statistics student who, when driving his car, would always accelerate hard before coming to any junction, whizz straight over it , then slow down again once he’d got over it. One day, he took a passenger, who was understandably unnerved by his driving style, and asked him why he went so fast over junctions. The statistics student replied, “Well, statistically speaking, you are far more likely to have an accident at a junction, so I just make sure that I spend less time there.”

A very large mathematical convention was held in Las Vegas. The conventioneers filled two hotels, each with an infinite number of rooms. The hotels were across the street from each other and were owned by brothers.

One evening, while everyone was out at a bar-b-que, one of the hotels burned to the ground. The brothers got together and worked out a plan. In the remaining hotel, they moved all guests to twice their room number — room 101 moved to 202, room 1234 moved to room 2468, etc.

Then all the odd number rooms were empty, and there were an infinite number of odd rooms. So the guests from the other hotel moved into them.

A new government 10 year survey cost $3,000,000,000 revealed that 3/4 of the people in America make up 75% of the population.

According to recent surveys, 51% of the people are in the majority.

Did you know that 87.166253% of all statistics claim a precision of results that is not justified by the method employed?

80% of all statistics quoted to prove a point are made up on the spot.

According to a recent survey, 33 of the people say they participate in surveys.

Q: What do you call a statistician on drugs?
A: A high flyer.

Q: How many statisticians does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: 1-3, alpha = .05

There is no truth to the allegation that statisticians are mean. They are just your standard normal deviates.

Q: Did you hear about the statistician who invented a device to measure the weight of trees?
A: It’s referred to as the log scale.

Q: Did you hear about the statistician who took the Dale Carnegie course?
A: He improved his confidence from .95 to .99.

Q: Why don’t statisticians like to model new clothes?
A: Lack of fit.

Q: Did you hear about the statistician who was thrown in jail?
A: He now has zero degrees of freedom.

Statisticians must stay away from children’s toys because they regress so easily.

The only time a pie chart is appropriate is at a baker’s convention.

Never show a bar chart at an AA meeting.

Old statisticians never die, they just undergo a transformation.

Q: How do you tell one bathroom full of statisticians from another?
A: Check the p-value.

Q: Did you hear about the statistician who made a career change and became an surgeon specializing in ob/gyn?
A: His specialty was histerectograms.

The most important statistic for car manufacturers is autocorrelation.

Some statisticians don’t drink because they are t-test totalers. Others drink the hard stuff as evidenced by the proliferation of box-and-whiskey plots.

Underwater ship builders are concerned with sub-optimization.

The Lipton Company is big on statistics–especially t-tests.

An engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician are trying to set up a fenced-in area for some sheep, but they have a limited amount of building material. The engineer gets up first and makes a square fence with the material, reasoning that it’s a pretty good working solution. “No no,” says the physicist, “there’s a better way.” He takes the fence and makes a circular pen, showing how it encompasses the maximum possible space with the given material.

Then the mathematician speaks up: “No, no, there’s an even better way.” To the others’ amusement he proceeds to construct a little tiny fence around himself, then declares:

“I define myself to be on the outside.”

1. They speak only the Greek language.

2. They usually have long threatening names such as Bonferonni, Tchebycheff, Schatzoff, Hotelling, and Godambe. Where are the statisticians with names such as Smith, Brown, or Johnson?

3. They are fond of all snakes and typically own as a pet a large South American snake called an ANOCOVA.

4. For perverse reasons, rather than view a matrix right side up they prefer to invert it.

5. Rather than moonlighting by holding Amway parties they earn a few extra bucks by holding pocket-protector parties.

6. They are frequently seen in their back yards on clear nights gazing through powerful amateur telescopes looking for distant star constellations called ANOVA’s.

7. They are 99% confident that sleep can not be induced in an introductory statistics class by lecturing on z-scores.

8. Their idea of a scenic and exotic trip is traveling three standard deviations above the mean in a normal distribution.

9. They manifest many psychological disorders because as young statisticians many of their statistical hypotheses were rejected.

10. They express a deap-seated fear that society will someday construct tests that will enable everyone to make the same score. Without variation or individual differences the field of statistics has no real function and a statistician becomes a penniless ward of the state.