I gather, young man, that you wish to be a Member of Parliament. 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.

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

Statistics - figures used as arguments.

Numbers are like people; torture them enough and they'll tell you anything.

HANDY ENGINEERING CONVERSIONS ~ Ratio of an igloo's circumference to its diameter: Eskimo Pi ~ 2000 pounds of Chinese soup: Won ton ~ 1 millionth of a mouthwash: 1 microscope ~ Time between slipping on a peel and smacking the pavement: 1 bananosecond ~ Weight an evangelist carries with God: 1 billigram ~ Time it takes to sail 220 yards at 1 nautical mile per hour: Knot-furlong ~ 16.5 feet in the Twilight Zone: 1 Rod Serling ~ Half of a large intestine: 1 semicolon ~ 1000 aches: 1 megahurtz ~ Basic unit of laryngitis: 1 hoarsepower ~ Shortest distance between two jokes: A straight line (think about it for a moment) ~ 453.6 graham crackers: 1 pound cake ~ 1 million-million microphones: 1 megaphone ~ 1 million bicycles: 2 megacycles ~ 365.25 days: 1 unicycle ~ 2000 mockingbirds: 2 kilomockingbirds ~ 10 cards: 1 decacards ~ 1 kilogram of falling figs: 1 Fig Newton ~ 1000 grams of wet socks: 1 literhosen ~ 1 millionth of a fish: 1 microfiche ~ 1 trillion pins: 1 terrapin ~ 10 rations: 1 decoration ~ 100 rations: 1 C-ration ~ 2 monograms: 1 diagram ~ 8 nickels: 2 paradigms ~ 2.4 statute miles of intravenous surgical tubing at Yale University Hospital: 1 I.V. League ~ 100 Senators: Not 1 decision

"Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."

Seems suspicious: 3 horses per person? Danger of statistics (or does it mean that people with horses own, on average, three) Statistics on pet ownership in 2001 from the latest Statistical Abstract of the United States, released Tuesday by the Census Bureau: Percent of pet-owning households that owned a: Dog: 36.1 percent Cat: 31.6 percent Pet bird: 4.6 percent Horse: 1.7 percent Average number of pets owned, by type of pet: Dog: 1.6 Cat: 2.1 Pet bird: 2.1 Horse: 3 Percent of households seeking veterinary care, by pet owned: Dog: 85 percent Cat: 66.8 percent Pet bird: 12.9 percent Horse: 56.7 percent Average visits to veterinarian, per household per year, by pet owned: Dog: 2.8 Cat: 1.9 Pet bird: 0.3 Horse: 2.2 Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, American Veterinary Medical Association

The book also has a good chapter on "Amazing Coincidences." These are strange events which appear to give evidence of supernatural influences operating in everyday life. They are not the result of deliberate fraud or trickery, but only of the laws of probability. The paradoxical feature of the laws of probability is that they make unlikely events happen unexpectedly often. A simple way to state the paradox is Littlewood's Law of Miracles. Littlewood was a famous mathematician who was teaching at Cambridge University when I was a student. Being a professional mathematician, he defined miracles precisely before stat-ing his law about them. He defined a miracle as an event that has special significance when it occurs, but oc-curs with a probability of one in a million. This definition agrees with our common-sense understanding of the word "miracle." Littlewood's Law of Miracles states that in the course of any normal person's life, miracles happen at a rate of roughly one per month. The proof of the law is simple. During the time that we are awake and actively engaged in living our lives, roughly for eight hours each day, we see and hear things happening at a rate of about one per second. So the total number of events that happen to us is about thirty thousand per day, or about a million per month. With few exceptions, these events are not miracles because they are insignificant. The chance of a miracle is about one per million events. Therefore we should expect about one miracle to happen, on the average, every month. Broch tells stories of some amazing coincidences that happened to him and his friends, all of them easily explained as consequences of Littlewood's Law.

Most people use statistics the way a drunkard uses a lamp post, more for support than illumination.

<i>Obviously</i>... Not many Americans have one testicle and one ovary. <i>Surprise</i>... In fact, the <i>average</i> American has one testicle and one ovary. Statistics is a subject of enormous utility that can lead us to great insights into trends and patterns. But blind application of statistical formulas can paint a misleading picture of our world and cause us to statistically drop the ball.

Church Attendance Is Complicated

Stated simply, the number one reason for the decline in church attendance is that members attend with less frequency than they did just a few years ago. Allow me to explain. If the frequency of attendance changes, then attendance will respond accordingly. For example, if 200 members attend every week the average attendance is, obviously, 200. But if one-half of those members miss only one out of four weeks, the attendance drops to 175. Did you catch that? No members left the church. Everyone is still relatively active in the church. But attendance declined over 12 percent because half the members changed their attendance behavior slightly.