Statistical Humor

"Three statisticians go deer hunting with bows and arrows. they spot a big buck and take aim. One shoots and his arrow flies off three metres to the right. The second shoots and his arrow flies off three metres to the left. The third statistician jumps up and down yelling; We got him! We got him!"

Two unbiased estimators are sitting in a bar, having a few beers. The first one says, "How do you like being married?" The second one says, "It's okay, but you lose a degree of freedom!"

Q: What do you get if you cross an elephant with a grape?
A: Elephant grape cosine theta

A politician uses statistics as a drunk uses a lamp post - for support rather than illumination.

Prior to the birth of Thomas Bayes, the proud parents, Mr. and Mrs. Bayes, had 11 daughters. While Mrs. Bayes was pregnant with Thomas, she REALLY, REALLY wanted a son. So they went to the local seer, who placed her hands on Mrs. Bayes' stomach and pronounced that without a doubt, the next baby would be a boy. Well, Mrs. Bayes really, really believed that this next baby would be a boy. So when the baby actually arrived, the actual physical evidence that the baby was a girl was not strong enough to overcome her prior (ahem) belief that the baby would be a boy, and so the Bayeses named their new baby daughter Thomas and raised her to be the son they had always wanted.

Definition of a statistician: A mathematician broken down by age and sex.

On independence: I read that there's about 1 chance in 1000 that someone will board an airplane carrying a bomb. So I started carrying a bomb with me on every flight I take; I figure the odds against two people having bombs are astronomical.

On power: Here are the results of our drug testing study on rabbits: 1/3 of the sample died; 1/3 of the sample survived; the other one ran away.

Following a flaming snowmobile crash, one statistician asked the other if he was OK. The second said "well, my hair's on fire and my toes are frostbitten, but overall I feel pretty good."

Three people are stranded on a small island. One is a physicist, one is a circus strongman, and one is a statistician. After a few days of surviving on fruit, they discover a cache of canned food. They have to decide how to open it. The physicist says to the strongman "Why don't you climb that tree, and smash the cans down on the rocks, and burst them open"? The strongman says, "No, that would spatter the stuff all over. I can open the cans with my teeth"! The statistician says "First, we must assume that we have a can opener".

Q: Why do people decide to become statisticians?
A: They find accounting too exciting.

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

A statistician is someone who can draw a mathematically exact line from an unwarranted assumption to a foregone conclusion.

Do you hear about the statistician who drowned in a lake averaging only 2 inches in depth?

One day there was a fire in a wastebasket in the dean's office and in rushed a physicist, a chemist, and a statistician. The physicist immediately starts to work on how much energy would have to be removed from the fire to stop the combustion. The chemist works on which regent would have to be added to the fire to prevent oxidation. While they are doing this, the statistician is setting fires to all the other wastebaskets in the office. "What are you doing?" they demanded. "Well to solve the problem, obviously you need a large sample size" the statistician replies.

"100,000 lemmings can't be wrong."

Statistician -- someone who insists on being certain about uncertainty.

Did you hear about ...

• the four statisticians who were caught in a boating shop tossing packages of canvas around? It turned out that they were just fore- casting sales.
• the statistician who went out on a limb to obtain a nested design?
• the statistician who attempted the distribution of joints but was arrested by the vice-squad?
• the statistician who was looking all over for the sum of eigenvalues from a variance-covariance matrix but couldn't find a trace?
• the nonparametrician who couldn't get his driving license? He couldn't pass the sign test.
• the statistician who was a real mean mathematician?
• the two binomial random variables who talked very quietly because they were discrete?
• the ancient roman statistician who was always called a nerd? Turns out he was just a Latin Square.
• the father and son station wagon? Talk about a case of auto-car relation!
• the nine-foot tall roman numerals who took over Congress and outlawed decimals? It was just a case of the strong law of large numbers.
• the random sample of stupid submarine. It was a dense sub-set.

A politician travelling to Scotland looked out of the train window and saw a number of black sheep. "That's interesting", he said, "all Scottish sheep are black". "No, no", warned his agent. "Don't make positive statements like that. Best just say 'Some Scottish sheep are black'. Isn't that right, Jim?"
Jim, a statistician, replied "Well, on the evidence so far, the only thing you can say is 'Some Scottish sheep are black - on one side".

A statistician is a person whose lifetime ambition is to be wrong 5% of the time.

Someone read in the Script that God protects all fools and decided to test it empirically. He jumped out of the window and broke a leg. There he lies, writhing in pain, and happily thinks: 'I never really considered myself a fool, but I never knew I was THAT clever!'.